Columnist – John Sammon
Obama’s long expected decision to escalate the Afghanistan War is based on the dubious conclusion that if decisive military victory over the Taliban isn’t possible, some kind of honorable (for us) chastisement of them is, by holding more ground, as well as retraining a corrupt regime in Kabul to be more honest.

It demonstrates a sad fact.

Some change in the status quo in the way America is, is possible. But not much. Not enough.

Obama ran his candidacy on a call for change. His supporters voted for him in part based on that promise. He was elected on that premise.

Unlike the war-making, torture-mongering wire-tapping crooks Bush and Cheney, Obama is a decent and honorable man. He is attempting to change some things, health care for one. But the public should understand that no matter who holds the office, the United States is not truly of and by and for the people, but a conglomerate geo-political-military-industrial ruling elite whose first priority is to maintain monetary power and influence, material and energy wealth.

Obama, nor anyone else, will be able to change these:

  1.  The US will continue to make war on or meddle in the affairs of much smaller, Third World impoverished countries, because of political differences, or we want their natural resources, those who lack a navy, air force, shoes on their feet and refrigerators. We’ve been in Afghanistan eight years, and killed a number of them, but it’s not enough, enough revenge. We have to triumph over them, or at least appear to. No attempt will be made to reach a political settlement until enough people have died. Just from the standpoint of size and firepower, the US comes off looking like an imperialist bully, but its people many of them nonetheless for some reason have great pride that we are sometimes able to defeat these impoverished pygmy countries.

  2.  The US will just as assiduously avoid military attack on small countries that have a nuclear capability, like Iran and North Korea. Any country, even a small one, that could strike back and cause us great harm, we will treat with caution and seek a political solution.

  3.  The US will continue to back Israel to run wild in the Middle East pushing Palestinians out, treating them like dogs, sometimes murdering them, and building new settlements on formerly Palestinian land, which over decades is what led to the anti-American sentiment and 9-11. There’s a huge difference between defending Israel’s right to exist, and equipping them with sophisticated weapons so they can expand at the expense of others who have also lived in the area for centuries. There is a very powerful pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill and championed by the likes of Joe Lieberman that makes any objective discussion of the situation impossible.

Anyone, including Obama, who criticizes Israel, is immediately branded an anti-Semite. Americans never look in a mirror when it comes to understanding how a problem came to be. They believe they are always innocent, noble, incapable of error, and that bad evil countries picked on them for no reason at all.

  4.  The US government and the priorities of the country will continue to be influenced by corporate lobbyists whose loyalty is to their industry and profits and not the American people. Thus, ruthless, dishonest corporations of the kind that nearly destroyed the economy will continue to hold sway. Money talks.

  5.  America will continue to be domestically the most violent country in the history of the world, a nation of child abusers, rapists, serial and spree killers, drive-by back shooters and gangs. Media will express shock and ask “why?” at each new atrocity, and then run the usual nightly shit entertainment programming glorifying violence, beautiful Hollywood models and cool-dude guys with their perfectly arranged hair pointing hand guns in prime time, acting tough and yelling “freeze!” Right before a Viagra commercial.

This is a sick country with twisted values, and will remain so.

  6.  Americans, using religion and the military, will continue to believe they are better than other people. You never hear a Frenchman say God bless France, or a Honduran say God bless Honduras, like you hear “God bless America.” This fantasy supposes that the creator of all life, the God of all people, would select for special reverence a nation above all others with an artificial border created by European immigrants who purchased or out-rightly conquered it from its former owners, while also performing the extermination of its original native inhabitants.

  7.  Racism will continue.

  8.  So will sexism.

  9.  There will be no standard flat and fair tax for Americans, but a system that bleeds the middle class and rewards the few richest.

10.  The destruction caused by global warming will race ahead of any president’s attempt to deal with it, and any president who does, will face the anger of the people who will call him a traitor.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Maybe Obama can undo the Bush Cheney years. I doubt he can on his own.

The Founding Fathers who talked about freedom and designing an egalitarian state were themselves elitist, racist and corporate (Alexander Hamilton called the public an ass). America has not lived up to its promise, for it was a promise only made, not intended to be kept. Basically, the system has been and still to this day is founded on the principle, the (white) cream, the privileged elite among us, rises to the top.

Obama remains something of an anomaly. Elected by a popular vote, how long he remains in office and is viewed with favor depends on the degree to which he attempts to change the corporate influence on American life and the unquestioning obedience to it of the American people.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1.   Look at the numerous wars we’ve fought or instigated, always in the name of righteousness. Look at the list of our opponents. A few were evil, corporate and powerful, for example, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, developing dictatorial states who attempted to copy the imperialism of England and the United States. Remember, Japan was a hermit kingdom that simply wanted to be left alone until we forced her to open her doors for exploitation and she began to modernize at a rapid rate. But many wars have been dynastic in nature, colonial, undertaken against impoverished Third World nations for natural resources, from the Philippines in 1900 to gain a colony in Asia, to Iraq, deposing a dictator we had equipped and encouraged because he wouldn’t act like a proper puppet, and we wanted his oil.

2.   Capitol Hill is ruled by corporate lobbyists, whose loyalty is not to the country, but to their respective corporations and the profit margins they gain by not only exploiting you as a customer, artificially jacking up the price of oil, or skyrocketing the price of medicines, or developing overseas markets to take advantage of cheap or slave labor even if it means eroding jobs here at home and promoting unethical, obscene regimes abroad. China for example. Thus, it’s not the government and the people of the United States. It’s the government, the lobbyists and the people in order of influence, with the people a distant third. Dynastic and monetary power rules.

3.   The American people, many of them, it sounds harsh to say, are fairly stupid, and docile, fertile ground for manipulators. Many of them get their filtered news from corporate controlled television conglomerates or hate radio. Stupidity is not a matter of simply not knowing. It’s not wanting to know, not caring that you don’t know. Tuning out. Never doubting. Not reading. Not learning.

4.   THE PRESIDENT IS ABOVE THE LAW. They, the powers that be, love to say it isn’t so. But time and again it’s been proven. Nixon should have done jail time. Bush and Cheney should be prosecuted for lying America into a war over false weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Always, the reasons for not doing it are the same, it’s inconvenient, it makes us look bad, we need to move ahead. The problem with excusing wrongdoing because it was allegedly patriotically motivated is that it encourages future wrongdoing. It also creates two separate classes of accountability, us, and them.

5.   The United States is truly a Roman Empire-style colossus, stockpiling every kind of weapon imaginable, arming much of the world with these weapons, but castigating countries we don’t like for trying to acquire the same weapons.

6.   There is a developing disturbing psychological quirk only I report. American military officers and soldiers have taken to posing with the bodies of defeated foes for photos, such as the dead sons of Saddam Hussein. Or, the still-living wretches thrown into Abu Ghraib Prison, tied up and photographed often in bondage, pseudo-sexual positions. Wanting to project power by using bodies as perverse propaganda props makes me doubt the sanity of people who, like Frankenstein’s monster, have been sent out in the world to do good in our name.

7.   Our former president loved posing in uniform like Benito Mussolini, even though he was only a Vietnam-dodging, National Guard week-end warrior who skipped meetings.

8.   In the reactionary hysteria after 9-11, everybody drove around town displaying flags from car antennas in a tacky display as though they were bumper stickers. This was new. Misuse of the flag in a cheap football pep rally-like attempt to stifle dissent and to glorify solidarity for government policy is perhaps the most basic of all fascist tendencies.

9.   To a corporate democraphobe (dislikes democracy), the following rating system applies, war, good, weapons, good, profits from outrageous prices, good, spend on schools, bad, help people in need with training, bad, shared health care, bad, immigration, bad.

10.   A McCarthy-style climate of fear, of enemies, traitors, subversives, Islam, even though we love Saudi Arabia, has been promoted.

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Inside Bush and Cheney’s Final Days: Both planned the war on terrorism but broke over whether to pardon one of its key architects — “Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby“

Time: Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point — and perhaps past it — over the fate of his former aide. “We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cheney argued. [ READ MORE ]

Cheney’s Last Stand

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Who says you can’t learn anything from history. Certainly our leaders must think that, because they never seem to learn. They don’t study history. I want to point out the mistake Bush and Cheney made in the Middle East before their disastrous administration fades in the collective memory.

Nobody thinks of these kinds of things except me.

Bush made almost the exact, identical strategic mistake that George Custer made at Little Bighorn, and Hitler on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia.

Custer, a supreme egotist, fatally divided his men into three prongs (a fourth was bringing up supplies). The three prongs of the attack against the Sioux village at the Big Horn were far enough apart physically, that no prong could support the other prongs if the other prongs ran into trouble. In other words, the Indians could defeat each of the three prongs of the attack separately.

The rest is history. Custer and one-third of his men were cut off and annihilated while the other two-thirds (the other two prongs) took refuge on a hilltop until the Indians broke off the battle.

Hitler did the same thing. Hitler invaded Russia in three prongs. The Northern prong was to capture Leningrad. The middle prong was to capture Moscow, and the southern prong was to capture the Ukraine and the Caucasus with its oil. Each of the three prongs was just weak enough, not to be able to accomplish the mission it had been given.

Like Custer, Hitler fatally divided his force into three. Also like Custer, each prong was far enough away from the others that it couldn’t provide support to the others if the others got in trouble.

All three could be defeated individually.

Hitler wouldn’t listen to his generals’ advice and meddled in the plan. First, he changed his mind on capturing Moscow, and sent that force north to help take Leningrad. Then, he changed his mind again, and decided to bring that force back, and to send it against Moscow as originally planned. Months were lost in the shuffle.

The Russian winter came. The rest is history. Hitler, like Custer, fatally divided his forces, and bit off more than he could chew. He lost.

Here comes Bush and Cheney. They decided they could launch two wars at once, Iraq and Afghanistan, in this case, two prongs. Bush wouldn’t listen to generals who told him he didn’t have enough force on the ground, and fired them.

Hitler also fired his generals who told him things he didn’t want to hear.

Like Hitler, Bush, was a strategic blunderer. Rather than listen to experts, he listened to Cheney, who told him our troops would be greeted in Iraq as liberators and flowers thrown at their feet. It would be a cakewalk.

Bush put most of his push, men, equipment into Iraq, and reduced Afghanistan to a relative sideshow. Iraq turned out to be tougher than expected. This gave the Taliban in Afghanistan time to recoup and recover and re-take the initiative. Now, Afghanistan is a shambles, and Obama is trying to un-do Bush’s stupid mistakes, by withdrawing troops from Iraq, and sending them instead to Afghanistan, where they should have been sent in the first place.

Because of this bungling, a clear victory has been achieved in neither theatre.

What do Custer, Hitler, Bush and Cheney have in common beyond stupidity and arrogance?

Old Russian proverb. If you try to catch three rabbits at the same time (or even two), you wind up catching none.

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Shows you how out of touch with reality these ReTHUGlican wing-NUTS are. Bill “Osama Bin” O’Reilly clearly believes that Bush and Cheney, the two worst war criminals of this century, are innocent of any wrong doings.

The chilling lies by the Bush and Cheney to cover up their IRAQI SLAUGHTER will unravel eventually and these two despicable HITLERS will pay for their crimes. Obama may protect them for now, but what goes around always comes around — one way or another!

G.O.P Psycho Talk RoundUp For 06-08-2009

From Media Matters:

BOORTZ: OK, the Terminator, the Governator, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is actually happy, ladies and gentlemen, that illegal aliens in California get state services and says they’re not to blame for the budget gap in California. He’s happy that illegal aliens get state services. By the way, how many illegal aliens can you get into a Ford Excursion? Apparently about 27. Looks like a Mexican clown car. And you can actually roll that Ford Excursion on a back road in Arizona and only kill 10 of them. And on Fox & Friends this morning, I actually heard Brian Kilmeade refer to them as undocumented immigrants.

Neil Boortz Jokes: You can fit 27 “illegal aliens” into a Ford Excursion, “roll” it, “and only kill 10 of them”

Gingrich again claimed Sotomayor “clearly supported racial quotas” in Ricci case

Gingrich’s solution to North Korea sentencing of U.S. journalists: “[R]eplace the regime”

CNN’s Moos highlights quackery from Robertson, O’Reilly

Fox News falsely asserted Obama claimed “there is no more terrorism”

Fox News on-screen text falsely asserted that, during his Cairo speech, President Obama claimed “there is no more terrorism,” and Fox News analyst Ralph Peters accused him of “pretending” it “doesn’t exist.” In fact, Obama addressed at length the issue of “violent extremism” in his speech. [ READ MORE ]

Hannity’s new false talking point: Obama decided to “take over Fannie, take over Freddie”

Sean Hannity falsely claimed or suggested that the Obama administration acted to “take over Fannie, take over Freddie.” In fact, it was the Bush administration that made the decision to “take over” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. [ READ MORE ]

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