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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   By: Joe Conason
Like a seasonal flu, the verbal virus that is sometimes called Clinton derangement syndrome has struck again, beginning only moments after the 42nd president of the United States appeared on television screens around the world with the two journalists he had helped to rescue from prison in North Korea. And like certain viruses, the syndrome tends to hit hardest among a very specific segment of the population. Most Americans appear to be immune most of the time, as do the majority of human beings on the planet, so this pathology will probably never become a global pandemic.

But pundits everywhere — from the newsrooms of the “liberal media” to the blogosphere to the Republican noise machine — seem to be the preferred hosts of the pathogen. While not lethal or physically disabling, it troubles their minds — and strikes the same people over and over and over again. Symptoms include the recitation of dull sexual japes, sour reflections on celebrity, mindless pronouncements on foreign policy, false accusations of grandstanding, and even furious attacks on innocent individuals who dare to express admiration or gratitude to Bill Clinton (on this particular occasion for saving their lives).

On display in the wake of his successful effort to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is the purest and most virulent form of a disorder all too familiar to anyone who lived through the Clinton presidency.

Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America — a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.

But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton.” Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton “hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home.” Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that “the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton” (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton’s mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was “some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy.” And not for the editors of the Huffington Post, who posted a very strange headline — “Bill Upstages Hillary … Once Again” — on an Associated Press story that didn?t mention her at all.

Liddy tells joke about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee” “being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton”

Here is Watergate THIEF G. Gordon Liddy: Obama Was Born in
The Kenyan Slum of ‘MUMBASA.’ Mombasa! ..Idiot!

On Greta, Eagleburger chides Fox coverage of Clinton’s North Korea visit: “I thought they were going to wet their pants”

Analysts have long speculated on the sexual envy that may or may not predispose the syndrome’s sufferers to say these things. What seems clear, however, is that no matter what humanitarian acts Clinton may perform in his post-presidency, he cannot do anything without provoking such inappropriate and embarrassing outbursts. The result, of course, is that their remarks always reveal more about them than about their intended target.

Consider the reaction of the former president’s former advisor Dick Morris, who still pontificates on the Fox News Channel airwaves as a Clinton expert, although he hasn’t spoken with either of them for more than 10 years. Denouncing Clinton’s trip as “awful” and “ridiculous,” he suggested with a sickening grin that Ling and Lee should instead have been left to “live with the consequences of their acts” — essentially a death sentence in a hard labor camp. (Is that what any Fox commentator would say in the unlikely event that any of their colleagues had the guts to try to report on life in North Korea — and got arrested?)

John Podhoretz didn’t go quite that far in Commentary, but he too felt deeply disturbed by Clinton’s achievement. As a “journalist” who spends most of his life watching television and eating ice cream, he felt moved to mock Ling and Lee for seeking to expose the dark side of the North Korean regime — and to throw in a few bitter words about Al Gore for employing them at Current TV. If that sounds bizarre coming from a self-styled hard-liner, it is simply another symptom of the mental imbalance induced in some people by the sight of Clinton (and Gore).

Finally there are the “serious” commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite “decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.” Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles — violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general.

But perhaps this latest outbreak should be considered mild, when compared with the devastating episodes of years past. Nobody is claiming that Clinton murdered or drugged anyone on his trip to Korea, that he profited by selling a real estate parcel there, or that he is a secret agent of the Dear Leader.

They’re saving all that for Barack Obama.

About The Author(s): Joe Conason is national correspondent for The New York Observer, where he writes a weekly column distributed by Creators Syndicate. He is also a columnist for Salon.com, and the Director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. His books Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, and The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Gene Lyons, were both national bestsellers; his latest book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, was released in February 2007. His writing and reporting have appeared in many publications, including Harpers, The Guardian, The Nation, and The New Republic. He also appears frequently on television and radio (notably as a regular Friday guest on Air America’s The Al Franken Show). He lives with his wife in New York City.

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Early Wednesday morning I watched with great pride as young journalist Laura Ling spoke emotionally about her imprisonment in North Korea. She spoke slowly, clearly, with great coolness and composure under enormous strain — a performance the fumbling and mangling, Psycho-Babbling Republican Bimbo, Sarah Palin (a journalism major), should bookmark for future reference.

A Job well done Mr. President Clinton!

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Ref: Let The Big Dog Run — Kim Jong-il’s bright smiles were not returned by Bill Clinton. Yet the grinning North Korean and stony-faced American were no doubt savoring their moment of mutual relevance.
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The Obama-Clinton Coalition

Needless to say, the primitive war-mongering Republican Neo-Cons pounced — blindfolded as usual. “Fu Manchu” Mustachioed former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, called Clinton’s role in winning the release of the two journalists a “significant propaganda victory” for the “terrorists.”

Mr. Bolton: We are all terrorists, it just depends on the lens you are looking through! Bush, your former employer is the world’s number one terrorist as far as I am concerned, a murdering war criminal who will go to his grave in a blood caked coffin.

Toe-Sucking pervert Dick Morris had a cynical view of Clinton’s trip: .”…But, we suspect, Obama had a more sinister motivation for letting the stunt unfold: He wanted to change the subject from health care. He knows that he is getting clobbered in the national debate. He sees his approval dropping and is watching as the elderly coalesce against his health care initiative.” “He is terrified of August. August is when legislators discover where their districts are located and go home to get an earful from those they represent. Increasingly, it seems the month will be particularly rocky for Democratic advocates of his health care proposals. He would do anything to change the subject. But we cannot let him,” added the discredited lying sack of SHIT.

Mr. Morris: An earful from your Republican Tea-bagging goons? White Power THUG-GOONS organized by your sinking, racist party, to disrupt town-hall proceedings? Give me a break!

Sex starved pedophile, Rush Limbaugh went one step further — suggesting that Clinton hit on the female journalists on the flight back from N. Korea. LOL!

I am surprised that Oriental Auntie Thomasina Michelle Malkin didn’t fling her usual bucket of dung! LOL!

NEO-CON NutBags Take Shots At Clinton/Obama

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Reference: Clinton derangement syndrome, North Korean strain
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The late night shows were determined not to be left out:

Jon Stewart Blasts The Neocons, CNN and Fox

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
William Jefferson Airplane
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Next Wednesday, let’s attack North Korea. C’mon US Government. Don’t be chicken.

Under the Republicans, you attacked Saddam Hussein because he was building a nuke. He wasn’t. That was a lie.

But let’s say it was true, instead of a lie from Bush and big Dick Cheney. Let’s say Saddam was building a bomb as Bush said, even though he wasn’t.

If we attack Iraq because it was building a bomb, why do we let North Korea slide?

If we’re not going to be hypocrites, we can’t attack one evil country (Iraq) and kill millions of its people in the process, and let another evil country do the same thing and just get away with it.

As a taxpayer, I expect and demand satisfaction. Let the guns roar. We start by targeting North Korea’s nuclear factory. We know where it is. Then we Pyongyang ‘em, lay their capital city waste. Bomb ‘em back into the stone age. Before they can do it to us three years from now.

Remember, Iraq, now going into its seventh year, was originally a “punitive strike,” as stated by Bush the boy and his master big Dick C. Punitive means punishment, and strike implies quick, like lightening. Over with quickly. They never said, “War of attrition,” which means a long time.

What is it about our government, and the Republicans in particular, the party that loves war, a white man’s party, most of who never served in the military? Why did the big tough swaggering Republican phonies during their eight years in control of Congress let North Korea develop a bomb and a missile to deliver it?

I think it’s because Iraq is safer to target. We can still act the big guys. Are the American people actually proud that we can defeat a country in which a refrigerator and shoes on your feet are considered luxuries? They (Iraq) are so much smaller than us. They don’t have a navy. They don’t have an air force.

Should a heavyweight boxer be proud he defeated a bantam weight boxer?

I think we’re yellow. We only attack countries that are small, impoverished, and who don’t have a navy, or an air force, and who can’t fight us back except for ragged insurgents (I never said they were good guys).

We’re afraid of North Korea. They can fight back. The problem with only fighting backward, small countries that don’t have an enormous, colossal military, and an array of sophisticated doomsday weapons that would amaze God himself. The problem with that is, it makes us seem like bullies, and cowards to boot.

In the figurative schoolyard of the world, as the biggest kid in the schoolyard, we only pick fights with much smaller, safer kids. North Korea is a smaller figurative kid, but too tough to mess with. He’ll fight back and probably cause us some pain.

I call for an attack on North Korea and a formal declaration of war. I tell you what. I’ll help out. I’ll have us at war with those sonsofbitches, and I’ll make it look like it’s their fault.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Why does North Korea do this?

Because it works.

North Korea’s testing of a nuclear weapon is the same old stick and carrot approach North Korea always uses. Again and again. They get away with it. Again and again.

Each time they do, it’s like a repeat, an exact copy of the way they did it before, the last crisis they caused, just the same way. A repeat. Like another little Munich crisis, recalling when gullible European leaders attempted to reason with and appease Hitler, and in selling away the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, brought them all another step closer to war.

Here’s how it works.

Every time.

A.    North Korea announces to the world it will test a nuclear weapon, or a delivery system for the weapon (missile).

B.    The world, four-fifths of it, protests. Nothing is done.

C.    Despite protests, North Korea tests the weapon, or missile, which works better (more improved) every time.

D.    The world, four-fifths of it, protests again, after the test.

E.    North Korea then threatens war (the stick in the stick and carrot) if economic sanctions are taken against it.

F.    China and Russia veto possible economic embargo action by the UN against their former client state (North Korea).

G.    North Korea gets away with it, and keeps building a bomb and a missile to deliver it.

H.    When things get tense to the breaking point, sometimes, North Korea makes some kind of vague statement about the desire for peace, and renewed talks, even though they have violated past agreements with the precision of a Swiss clock (that’s the carrot in the stick and carrot).

Meanwhile, the idiotic policy of the former moronic president, George Bush, to seek a winless 40-year war in the Middle East by fighting ragged insurgents who don’t have a bomb, and ignore a country that is openly building one in violation of all previous agreements, continues to suck up lives and treasure and focus.

The legacy of the moron Bush was to fixate on the wrong enemy. If we ignore the criminal immorality of his regime and look at it strategically, Bush was the worst strategist since Benito Mussolini.

It makes sense. Doesn’t it make sense? Let’s ignore the gravest threat to world peace in the world and instead waste time, money and lives trying to pry vagabonds out of mountain caves in rural Afghanistan.

North Korea advances step by step.

The trump cards are Russia and China. Just as they did during the Korean War in 1951, Russia and China give North Korea power, by vetoing any attempt at the UN to rein in the mad dog (North Korea) by using economic or embargo sanctions.

Successive presidents starting with Richard Nixon and including Bill Clinton and the Bush boys have deluded themselves that Russia and China are our friends, when they are not. They are dictatorships masquerading as democracies.

They will continue to block any opposition to North Korea in the UN. The lunatic foaming at the mouth in Pyongyang knows this.

What will Obama do? That’s going to be interesting to see.

I predict a new to-the-brink-of-Armageddon crisis over North Korea that will be much like the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, when the world came within a hair’s breath of turning itself into fused glass. Only this time, the finger on the trigger (the North Korean finger) will be more unstable than Khrushchev was in 1962.

On that note, to readers of Politicalarticles.net, I say, happy Memorial Day.

CNN: S. Korea to join a U.S.-led effort to crack down on trafficking in WMDs, while U.N. Security Council condemns nuclear test as a “clear violation” of U.N. resolutions. Ally China urges North Korea to return to disarmament talks. United States says North Korea’s nuclear test was “grave violation” of law. [ READ MORE ]

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