Too bad Saddam Hussein isn't still around to consult, too.

on edit-- I've spent the last couple of minutes staring at the photo. It makes me want to throw my computer out the window. It makes me want to puke. It makes me want to eat broken glass in memory of all the suffering and death that old ghoul caused in our goddam names.

I sincerely hope the Rude Pundit has something more eloquent to say about that photo.

People have been trained to value propriety in rhetoric above human life itself. So never mind that you're right, or that anyone who isn't angry about this is either ignorant of history or in deep denial. Anger's supposed to discredit, I tells ya.

From Hiroshima to Syria, the Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak

The Biggest Lie

by JOHN PILGER

CounterPunch, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

On my wall is the front page of Daily Express of September 5, 1945 and the words: “I write this as a warning to the world.” So began Wilfred Burchett’s report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again, we are held hostage to the prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity’s most dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.

SNIP...

Under the “weak” Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, and piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their beribboned façade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than are dying on battlefields. Last year, 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

The historian Norman Pollack calls this “liberal fascism”. “For goose-steppers,” he wrote, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” Every Tuesday, the “humanitarian” Obama personally oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that “bugsplat” people, their rescuers and mourners. In the west’s comfort zones, the first black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood. This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war movement: Obama’s singular achievement.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/11/the-biggest-lie/

Peace really must be old school nowadays, like justice and democracy.

Since 1963 and before.

65, 50, 40 years - same national security state. Same global war regime. Same empire. Cannot be more compactly illustrated. Kerry and Kissinger talking about Assad!? In the book of post-WWII war criminals, Kissinger will be among the top 5 or 10 features. Assad might be a footnote.

This government has no legitimacy to speak on the world stage. Back off your insane plans for Syria!

Know your BFEE: The Secret Government

I'd LOL, but, you know.

When was it not Wall Street and Pentagon (so to speak) in power?

Jimmy Carter tried, but the "rogue" CIA was funded by Safari Club and Ollie North sabotaged the hostage rescue while Bill Casey and Poppy Bush made nice with the Ayatollah and that was all she wrote. The rest of the time, it's been "Money trumps peace" as far as the Peace Dividend and Welfare for the Wealthy went.



From the great DUer Drunken Irishman:

Do you know the last Republican ticket without a Bush or Nixon to win was 1928?

When Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis defeated Al Smith and Joseph T. Robinson?

1952: Eisenhower/Nixon defeats Stevenson/Sparkman
1956: Eisenhower/Nixon defeats Stevenson/Kefauver
1968: Nixon/Agnew defeats Humphrey/Muskie
1972: Nixon/Agnew defeats McGovern/Shriver
1980: Reagan/Bush defeats Carter/Mondale
1984: Reagan/Bush defeats Mondale/Ferraro
1988: Bush/Quayle defeats Dukakis/Bentsen
2000: Bush/Cheney defeats Gore/Lieberman*
2004: Bush/Cheney defeats Kerry/Edwards

*selected by the SCOTUS

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022460800

And to think I get heat from those who don't believe in conspiracies, let alone the BFEE.

Have you read James Carroll's "House of War," Jack? It's a history of the building and how the place has taken on, heh, a life of its own.

Looks great! Thanks!

We cheer every "victory". Military victory. Economic victory. Diplomatic victory. Political victory.

We are apparently "winning", yet, economic indicators stare us in the face and scream that most of us are losing on a historic scale.

We loudly cheer for our team with each hollow, meaningless "victory". We are led to believe we are winning, but the numbers show that much less than 1% of us are actually winning. Almost every one of our elected representatives among them.