The American people are not the only dupes to be patronized and bullied by the Empire’s congressional-military-media complex. According to RawStory.com, “A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to ‘destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.'”
As the report would have it, these silly people simply don’t understand that the entity we call NATO, but is really the US, needs to be in Afghanistan for their own good; the good of the Afghan people. For example, to destroy their only source of income: the poppy fields.
And so a reeducation program must commence. “‘We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,’ ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.”
Remember “Radio Sawa”? You should. If you are a tax payer, you pay for it. Part of the neocon’s democratic deal in Iraq was that we got to pipe into Iraqi ears pro-American propaganda interspersed with J. Lo’s caterwauling and Jay-Z’s gutter grunts. The idea was to make them both love us and want to be like us.
Why don’t we do the same for the Afghans? We could buy them all little radio transistors, and pipe “Radio Sawa” type propaganda into their long-suffering ears.
But first, let them get high on opium. Where I do agree with the think tank is in its proposal “that Afghanistan license the growing of opium.”
In December 24, 2001 I advocated, “Freedom and choice – not prohibition, incarcerations and coerced treatment – are the best salve for a people that has been infantalized and brutalized for too long. In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'”
UPDATE: For those of you who are new to my opinion on America’s foreign policy, please read up on the term “Reeducation.” After you have searched my Articles Archive under the relevant categories, of course.
“… In the words of a horrified Israeli aviation security expert, speaking to a Fox News crew: ‘You cannot allow the security personnel to see, and show the entire world, images of naked bodies of women and men!’ Amid ongoing American insanity, this laconic Israeli, Isaac Yeffet, has been making the rounds on CNN, PBS, Fox News—has been doing so for a decade, at least.
Yeffet is a former member of the Israeli Secret Service, and was once in charge of security for El Al. Almost a year has past since Fox News probed him for his opinion about the ‘full body scanners.’ Nearly ten years have gone by since the man testified before an equally idiotic Congress.
No other western country is a bigger target for terrorists than Israel. Yet no other nation runs a better (largely privatized), less invasive, smarter, security system, whose able agents simply talk to travelers. These profilers understand that 99.9 percent of fliers are ‘bona fide’ (Yeffet’s favored bon mot). ‘Shoes aren’t removed, passengers aren’t body scanned, and there are no pat downs,’ confirms the New York Times. A ‘hand search’ is seldom conducted, and only with probable cause.
Fox News wanted tough answers; Yeffet gave them smart ones. In countless news interviews over the years, Yeffet has implied that there is no substitute for intelligence—intelligence as in smarts; as in that dreaded G Factor. (No, Cosmo Magazine readers, that’s not the same as the G Spot.) …”
UPDATE I (Nov. 19): This country follows a mushy-headed maxim whereby to be a victim (of crime, terrorism, one’s own stupidity) is to be automatically conferred with oracular wisdom. This nonsense has been applied to any relative of those murdered on 9/11.
Two such Delphic creatures have praised the TSA home-grown terrorism and quipped that it would be far more productive to go long with the probe and grope routines.
I give you “Mary and Frank Fetchet, whose son, Bradley James Fetchet, was killed on Sept. 11. [They] have also issued a statement in support of the new measures, citing the failed Christmas Day plot last December as a reminder that ‘comprehensive security measures’ are still needed.”
Mary Fetchet appeared on FoxNews this morning, with a member of the (honey) Blond Squad, who herself quipped that news people are featuring a small noisy bunch of travelers which is in a minority.
Another believer is Alice Hoagland. The fact that her son was killed in the Twin Towers gives her the ostensible authority to recommend the inflicted rogering and radiating routines.
UPDATE II: In the footage of the agents feeling up every day Americans the mug of the offender is always concealed. Why? Isn’t it the victim who should remain anon? Even the people broadcasting these assaults on flying America have their head screwed on like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist.
And it’s so imbecilic. They’re going thorough the motions knowing full-well that they’ll never meet a terrorist; 99.99999% of the individuals they violate are “bona fide.”
UPDATE III (Nov. 20): I call the liberal neocon Judy Miller Mrs. Chalabi. She was one of the “presstitutes” who enabled the invasion of Iraq from her perch at the New York Times. She’s no journalist. She’s a media person. Big difference.
During her tenure at the Gray Lady, promoting Bush’s war, Judy made sure to exclude all analysis (including from highly regarded experts) that didn’t comport with the Bush “thesis” about Iraq. Her preferred sources of information were corrupt parties like Egypt, Jordan, ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin, and Ahmad Chalabi, the man who fed a willing administration phony intel on Iraq so as to fire-up the War Party.
Today, on Fox News Watch, Judy the non-journalist, said that the American media had not covered the Israeli airports security methods.
Nothing mainstream media write is original. We guerrilla journalists and writers are always ahead of the pack, but Ms. Miller, like her colleagues, does not consider that a story/angle has been covered in earnest until she or her colleagues have stumbled upon it.
Imagine: Judith Chalabi being a respected panelist on a program about media bias.
On the same stage, Kirsten Powers, a liberal member of the Fox News Blond Squad, expressed her satisfaction with the porn protocol at the airports, and wept in sympathy for TSA workers. Yeah, “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
“… MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has more street cred than most. The host of ‘Hardball’ spent the first two years of the Obama presidency in a state of delirium bordering on the sexual. Famous for experiencing something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission during Obama’s coronation – ‘thrill up the leg’ Matthews called the incident – Chris later begged Barack to be his ‘Enforcer,’ in the matter of sacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Understand: When a liberal like the president shows a bit of that manly magic, ‘girlie boys’ like Chris get giddy.”
Given Chris’ well-known carnal affections for Barack Obama, it is unfortunate that the op-ed segment with which he ends the ‘Hardball’ program daily is called ‘Let Me Finish.’
Yesterday, Matthews finished off by surmising that the ‘kick in the pants’ the president has sustained means that it was now up to Obama to make the Republicans an offer they could not refuse – especially with the entire country watching. The challenge for Obama, advised Matthews, is to force Republicans to join him, or look like creeps if they fail to join him. …
Yes, The 2010 midterm elections were a bloodbath for the Democratic Party. Because there are no mollifying messages to be had from such a political massacre, liberal pols, pundits, and other dominant interests, hastened to soften the “shellacking” by framing it in terms more tolerable. …”
UPDATED I (Nov. 5): BUT WHEN HE’S GOOD HE’S VERY GOOD.
Now how good is the following editorial by Chris Matthews?! And how good am I for being capable of seeing a good argument for what it is?! Why can’t Chris be as good at distilling the truth? In any case, this time “Let Me Finish” is a proper climax to the show (read “Beware Of Wolves In Bipartisan Clothing” to get all the sexual connotations):
Behold the transcript of this fabulous editorial. See the quality of intern/ignorant millennial (most probably) these large organizations are forced to hire (they love youth, and shun older, more literate workers). It’s one thing not to know the fine word “solipsistic”; it’s quite another to be bereft of the brains, the initiative, and the work ethic to look it up on an online dictionary before typing/transcribing the sentence.
Instead of “solipsistic,” which is what Matthews said, the moron MSNBC has hired to transcribe the audio (and do related work) wrote “solid cystic.” This is the kind of word salad one is treated to when watching the simultaneous translations offered up on the TV screens at the health club. The transcribing is being done by individuals who’ve almost no facility with the English language. That describes most American school and university graduates. Enjoy:
“Let me finish tonight with george w. bush. you know years ago a member of the british cabinet got caught in an embarrassment and of course denied it, to which his accuser said, well, he would, wouldn’t he? denial is the norm of political life especially of the awful. president bush says the iraq war was justified because it prevented another 9/11. well, 9/11 was a network operation involving cells in germa germany, heavy recruit in the saudi arabia and of course flight training down in florida. the one country not involved in 9/11 was iraq, the attack of 9/11 was conspired among a web of jihadists religion phanatics without loyalty to a particular state. saddam hussein was a baathist. so how would a war in iraq prevent another attack from elements of al qaeda? or is bushauring something that logically cannot be denied for the simple reason it has nothing to do with logic with the discernible cause and effect with anything tangible. is he saying that the war which caused 77,000 lives was justified because he thought it would prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11? in other words, if the connection between 9/11 and iraq, which no one else’s ever been able to substantiate, was in his own mental wiring, he’s guiltless before history. there’s a reason that bush lives in this solid cystic world. cause of effect or of tangible fact even, but of what george w. bush sees out there…”
UPDATE II: More on “compromising” from Diana West (who, I am sure, would have lots to say about the ill-educated non-adults who’re, increasingly, running this country):
If our new Republicans are as gullible as our old ones, instead of cutting taxes across the board, they just might “compromise” with Democrats, and that’s the end of that. Or instead of refusing to raise the national debt ceiling another trillion dollars, they just might “compromise” with Democrats and up it goes. Or instead of repealing Obamacare, they just might “compromise” with Democrats and fine-tune a few colossal programs. When all the votes are cast and backs patted, of course, “compromise” is a poor substitute for principle. But all we can do now is hope for change: that the GOP, backed by the tea party, stands strong this time even in the face of Democratic accusations that it is playing “politics as usual,” or acting like the “Party of No.” Because it’s a sure thing that such accusations are on their way. Indeed, even as voters were still heading to the polls on Tuesday, Michelle Malkin noted the Democratic National Committee had already released talking points that attacked Republican leaders who “are not willing to compromise.
[SNIP]
I would change “gullible to “venal” and “power hungry.”
The other day I said to a (male) friend: “I would give up my vote if I could be assured all women would do the same.” He replied: “In that case, I would consider voting.”
So does the vote count? Or does every vote counts?
Not at all. In “Default and Dynamic Democracy,” Loren E. Lomasky observed that, “As electorates increase in size, the probability that one’s vote will swing the election approaches zero” … “[I]n large-number electorates, there is a vanishingly small probability that an individual’s vote (or voice) will swing an election … [F]or citizens of large-scale democracies, voting is inconsequential.”
The winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. While it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is thwarted openly, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?
In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please. As Benjamin Barber wrote:
It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.
In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy E. Barnett further homes in on why genuinely informed individuals have little incentive to exercise their “democratic right”:
If we vote for a candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for, but we have also consented to the laws she has voted against.
If we vote against the candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for or against.
And if we do not vote at all, we have consented to the outcome of the process whatever it may be.
This “rigged contest” Barnett describes as, “‘Heads’ you consent, ‘tails’ you consent, ‘didn’t flip the coin,’ guess what? You consent as well.'”
On a more pragmatic note, here is how my libertarian WND pal, Vox Day, explains why there will be “No Change After Nov. 2”:
“The reason we can be sure that the Republicans are going to betray the tea party once they come to congressional power is that we know that they are not going to even attempt to solve any of the four most pressing problems facing the nation at the moment. In some cases, Republicans are almost certainly going to try to make them worse. Consider:
1) The economy. Republicans have nothing to offer on the subject. They are almost completely silent on the subject of state bankruptcies, pension-fund shortages and the secrecy of the Fed. Trading fiscal policy-oriented Neo-Keynesians for monetary policy-oriented Monetarist Keynesians isn’t going to materially improve anything.
3) Immigration. Republicans are mostly on the wrong side of this as well, being self-destructive fans of unsustainable open borders.
4) The endless wars. Republicans still support invading and occupying other nations despite the overall cost of the Bush/Obama wars now exceeding one trillion dollars.”
(I omitted Vox’s second point, “The massive mortgage fraud.” As you all already know, as much as I abhor the fractional reserve system that embroils banks in fraud, I do not agree that the facts, to which one must cleave religiously, support the case of the deadbeat defaulters. But we’ve both written exhaustively—and respectfully–about our “foreclosure fracas” disagreement.)
To Vox’s list of Republican contributions to the political morass we’re in, Paul Gottfried adds some other intractable accomplishments.
