Remembrance and Betrayal

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway

A requiem for this once great nation’s war dead:

World War One: 117,000

Word War Two: 405,000

Korea: 54,000

Vietnam: 58,000

Iraq: 2,264 and counting

You died so that a gutless little punk who couldn’t even be bothered to finish out his own military service after his rich and influential daddy landed him a coveted spot in the National Guard instead of a trip to the tropical hell of Vietnam could wage total warfare against that which is truly American, not the nationalist symbol of ‘Old Glory’ but that which is most hallowed in the constitution and the bill of rights. The tragedy is that you have been betrayed after you paid the ultimate price for your country so that in your passing:

Law abiding Americans could be spied on by their own government with the complicity of the corporate hacks in congress who lack the morality and the backbone to take a principled stand against such an egregious violation of the fourth amendment which specifically protects Americans against unwarranted invasions of privacy. All of the great totalitarians in the rogues gallery of the evil and the damned enjoyed the ability to conduct surveillance against their peoples so as to identify political opponents, quash dissent and suppress those who would seek to learn the truth about what sort of business is really conducted behind the closed doors of the Politburos, Reichstags and White Houses of the world. The rogue Bush administration’s use of the NSA in partnership with the telecom giants to electronically eavesdrop on law abiding citizens under the guise of protecting the cringing, servile, ignorant and apathetic populace of what was once justly referred to as ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ is an affront to every concept of freedom that you sacrificed so much to protect.

You perished before your time so that a rogue faction of extremist fascists could one day come to capitalize on mass public ignorance and apathy in order to rig not one but two national presidential elections, a bloodless coup that installed anti-American vermin like Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and a neo conservative junta whose ideologies were more influenced by the same thinkers who underwrote the Nazi regime. They are those who have far more in common with their brownshirted cousins than with the intentions of the founding fathers and whose seizure of the levers of power were manipulated by an utterly diabolical and ruthless Machiavellian traitor named Karl Rove to pit American against American using such age old tactics as race and religion baiting and feeding on nationalist frenzy so as to distort, deceive and mislead a cowed citizenry into surrendering the treasured liberties that you paid for with your lifeblood against enemies of the same sort of those who now shamelessly wrap themselves in the flag while waging war against the American people in the name of profiteering, empire and global hegemony.

You sacrificed so that America could one day become a torture state no better than the cruel and vicious enemies who you so valiantly fought against. The President of the United States and those who are the true power behind the throne have broken down barriers to inflicting cruel and unusual punishment against vaguely defined ‘enemies’ through the practices of acts so heinous that they are barred by the Geneva Convention which the axis of evil ensconced on the banks of the Potomac not only fail to recognize but hold in as much contempt as our very own constitution. Extraordinary renditions are used to transfer ‘enemy combatants’ to vile torture state nations where pesky courts do not act as an impediment to brutality and sadism. Our sexual perversion and wanton viciousness in acting out at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib has forever tarnished our people and our country in the eyes of the world outside of our brainwashed, self-indulgent fortress state. Neither history nor God will judge us favorably.

Gulag systems are currently being constructed right here in America by the same massive corporation that profits off of the blood and carnage in our latest illegal lie of a foreign war, Haliburton/KBR is the beneficiary of no bid government contracts facilitated by former CEO Richard Cheney, a five time draft deferment abusing chickenshit who dodged serving his country during the last bloody lie of a war in Vietnam. Who will ultimately be interned in these camps? Most likely the very Americans who choose to dissent against the tyranny of the cynical, amoral rulers of this sad, fading nation that once held so much promise but was betrayed by the enemies within whose disregard for democracy is surpassed only by their lust for power and riches.

You served with honor so those who are the most dishonorable of all, those whose only loyalty is to money have destroyed the once mighty American manufacturing base and now this country is the world’s largest debtor nation, owing trillions to China and the same Arab countries whose tyranny towards their own people still surpass ours… barely.

Our foreign policy is now more concerned with defending the existence of the bellicose state of Israel, a country whose arrogant belief that it has been chosen for the glory of God’s favoritism mirrors our own deep seated and misguided belief in exceptional qualities and divine providence and acting as its Golem in securing the Middle East while unfairly ignoring it’s very own cruelty and inhumanity towards the Palestinians. This misguided support is against our very own self-interest and fuels the fires of hatred across the region towards our bestowment of special nation status upon the mortal enemy or the poverty stricken and oppressed, this only perpetuates animosity and leads to more ‘terrorism’, perhaps another 9/11 style attack is what is most desired because it will be the trigger event for the imposition of the dictatorial police state for which the infrastructure has already been built.

You forfeited your futures so that we could become the must uninformed, overly entitled, apathetic, ignorant, regressive, overindulgent, selfish, reckless, cowardly, decadent and just plain mean collection of bitches and bastards on the face of the planet. A people devoted to the accumulation of materialistic goods, the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures, gorged to the point at bursting at our groaning seams with the cheap products of consumerism, instant gratification and the fascination with the bread and circuses that distract from the rot of the empire. We as a people are so poorly versed in history that it is a safe bet that most of our young (and a good percentage of our mature) citizens cannot even identify the wars in which you spilled your blood or locate the countries in which you died on a map. Our disinterest in civics have led to a political system as corrupt as any in modern history and allowed for criminals and sociopaths to gain control of all of our institutions of power from which they loot and plunder and eat away at the pillars of American society like termites. Our regression into pre-Enlightenment religious dogma has only served to allow an intellectually lazy public to seek an easy answer to the complex problems of the modern world, our disdain for science as well as our increasingly destructive bent for fundamentalist religion has made us a laughingstock to the civilized world.

God Damn us all for betraying your honorable sacrifice, we sure as hell don’t deserve it.

I will close this little rant with a passage from Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun:

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm..

But what do the dead say?

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say that I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying.

If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die.

Baby Bradgelina

"You know.....people are just pieces of shit"
-Daniel DeFoe

The unrelenting stream of bullshit that passes for news in the sad cesspool of shame that is the mainstream media never ceases to simultaneously amaze and disgust me. The love child of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie has dominated coverage over the weekend along with the tragic although all too predictable cacaphony over the latest and greatest natural disaster, this time a massive earthquake in Indonesia that killed at least 4,300 people, mainly peasants living in poorly constructed dwellings. Next to the toxic allure of celebrity, sleazy perversion, tales of wonder from the animal kingdom, child murderers and work related accidents involving miners of some sort there is nothing that gets the MSM’s panties in a bunch quicker than a good old natural disaster. The advertising gurus and network bean counters are already in the pre-planning stages of how to descend like a plague of locusts upon whichever coastal U.S. city happens to be devastated by one of the several massive hurricanes predicted to make landfall this season and any other catastrophe such as the Java quake represents both a bonus as well as a warm up drill. The cable news networks will undoubtedly swamp viewers in saturation coverage whenever a killer storm threatens Miami, Tampa, Galveston or even poor New Orleans again. The hacks who masquerade as journalists will seize upon the opportunity to grasp for the brass ring in search of instant stardom ala Anderson Cooper, the charlatan politicians will seek to posture and promote themselves while keeping a safe distance from any actual involvement in the human misery and the corporate vultures like Haliburton, Blackwater and Dyncorp will be awarded reconstruction contacts through a no bid spoils system and then bring in the same illegal immigrants to perform the work on the cheap while shafting the displaced in the immediate area.

What the mainstream media should be covering instead of panting and salivating over Baby Bradjelina is the horrible atrocity of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha but the craven editors and owners of state run McNews conglomerates don’t want to taint Memorial Day weekend with any such unpatriotic stories, never mind that every day that the Bush administration is left unchecked to continue the massive assault on American civil liberties, the destruction of the working class and allowed to remain bent on instigating a disastrous global conflict is tantamount to pissing on the graves of all those poor bastards who died in any of this nation’s foreign wars to preserve liberty only to see it surrendered with nary a whimper from the childlike cretins of the second generation of television babies. The media should be covering Friday’s closed-door session where Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and FBI Director Robert Mueller urged telecom execs to secretively keep records on all internet activity under the premise of a crackdown on child pornography. CNET news is the only place where I saw this truly important story that has successfully used the cloaking device of full spectrum corporate media dominance to fly under the radar of the public at large. Neither the Washington Post, the major television news networks or the damned liberal New York Times saw fit to cover it although they all swooned over the birth of Baby Bradjelina, all that was missing were their presentation of gifts of gold, frankincense and muir.

Truth Is Heresy: When the MSM is not exalting in the birth of Baby Bradjelina it is working on the behalf of the corporatist state in trashing and denigrating Al Gore’s hard hitting new movie on global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. In the tried and true method of muddying the waters and therefore denying the legitimacy of the debate industry front groups and their well placed and likely well compensated insiders and editorialists have combined to make snide remarks like the following by the notoriously biased Gregg Easterbrook:

"Gore says that the entire Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could melt rapidly, the film then jumps to animation of Manhattan flooded. Well, all that ice might melt really fast, and a UFO might land in London too."

Easterbrook is a longtime anti-environmental flack whose latest book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse features a cover shot of a glass of liquid that is dare it say it..half empty as an evocation of that famous Dale Carnegie style rhetorical question that is selectively used to judge whether a person is an optimist (Pollyanna) or a pessimist (realist) and therefore allow for the ostracism and marginalizing of any individual who dares to penetrate the sunny façade of ‘the power of positive’ thinking with the bummer of reality. This is a common problem in America society, specifically in the corporate environment and dare I sound pessimistic any society where telling the truth becomes a reason for being stigmatized is terminally fucked and destined for doom.

Harper’s Harping: No matter that our domestic manufacturing base is pretty much kaput and we have become addicted to the massive trade imbalances caused by the importation of cheap sweat shop goods that goose bottom lines in an appeasement to the temples of greed on Wall Street we have found an export commodity that seems to have the enduring potential of becoming the next great fad: fascism! Recently elected Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-winger determined to take down progressive society north of the U.S. border has played the George W. Bush card and began throwing the standard conservative hissy fit about the damned liberal media aka those who are trying to do their jobs by telling the truth. After reporters up and walked out of a recent press conference after Herr Harper refused to answer any questions he whined:

"Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view that they are going to be the opposition to the government”

Then he refused to talk to them at all in the future and conjured up the good ole bias bogeyman.. now where have I heard that one before? Maybe Scotty McClellan would be open to act as Harper’s proxy now that the professional liar is out of work and looking for a new gig. And as far as Canada being a refuge for Americans looking to escape from the fascist menace by fleeing north it now appears that the most viable alternative is in Central and South America so this is as good a time as any to enroll in Spanish.

The Mantooth Report: V.1.38

THE RAP SHEET

Poor Jake Plummer, living in the fishbowl that is Denver, where local newspapers once reported on the candy that John Elway gave out for Halloween. Plummer had the misfortune of being involved in a ROAD RAGE incident (caps provided by your local media outlets) last month that is just now coming to light. Apparently Plummer either tailgated or cut off or did something to another driver. There was honking (and honkees, because this is Denver) and then the stories diverge. Either Plummer did nothing wrong (Jake’s side) or he got out and kicked the other guy’s guys car, shouted something and drove off. OH MY GOD! HE KICKED HIS CAR!! ROAD RAGE! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! This story led every local newscast that night and took up muchas column inches in the papers. Let’s see there’s an immigration debate, the Enron trial, the war in which all combat operations have ceased in Iraq, the looting of our government and erosion of our civil liberties by the most gratuitously corrupt administration ever and Jake Plummer’s ROAD RAGE leads the news. And the MSM wonders why no one under the age of forty with a brain buys the shit they sell.

This is not a defense of the Snake who should have probably known better since regardless of who is telling the truth, something did happen. But is this really ROAD RAGE? I mean, I like my ROAD RAGE stories to have more meat to them (sorry vegans, but meat is good!) You know, the one where some 70 year old guy tailgates someone half their age and runs them down at the side of the road. Or when two guys go Ali – Fraizer in the middle of the highway because one was talking on his cell phone and not driving fast enough. Jake Plummer kicking some guy’s care ain’t shit.

Besides, if we want to demonize the Snake for this little peccadillo, there are a host of others in the League that have done far worse lately…

You’re Ricky Manning and you’ve just signed a big free agent deal with the Bears. How do you celebrate? By rolling to a SoCal Denny’s late at night with your crew (which includes UCLA running back Maurice Drew) and doing some Paki-bashing. Allegedly (and thanks to profootballtalk.com for this and all its other great reporting) Manning & Co. saw some guy sitting working on his laptop there while he ate. Apparently, they began to clown him, calling him a “nerd” and other things and when he complained to Denny’s employees, they beat him down and then fled, later to be apprehended by the police. The fact that he is Arab-American may or may not have something to do with it. Too bad that Dateline wasn’t there.

Rueben Droughns, who reputedly is one of the good guys in the NFL, beats a DWI rap thanks to a jock-sniffing jury and celebrates by getting arrested for domestic violence. And yes, I know his wife’s complaining about how hard it was to take a limo everywhere since Rube couldn’t drive was asinine, but no, she doesn’t deserve to be hit for that. Of course, she could have vandalized three of his luxury cars and burned down his mansion like the late, great Left-Eye Lopez did to Andre Rison…

Sean Taylor continues to face serious gun-related charges and an upcoming trial, but will probably walk thanks to the incompetence of the Dade County prosecutor.

Willis McGahee spent some time with a reporter rapping about the facts of life. Apparently, McGahee prefers ex-wives to baby-mommas, because while an ex just goes away, a baby momma wants to be around for the next 18 years and get money for extravagances like child support. All together now, you can take the Cane out of Miami, but you can take the Miami out of the Cane…

Chad Johnson grew a Mohawk --- I don’t mean to tar CJ as a guy with a rap sheet, I just include it because it’s damn funny. Check it out on www.deadspin.com from Thursday the 25th.

Johnson’s team, however, continues to collect guys with questionable character. The stink has gotten so bad that even a MSM guy like Dan Pompei (Mr. “The Lions will win the Super Bowl”) wrote about it in last week’s Sporting News. A good point is that the Bengals aren’t turd collecting (as PFT.com calls it) because they want bad guys, but because they are cheap. So guys with bad character fall in the draft and cost less to sign than guys with similar talent and good character. Of course, there is a cost to the inmates running the asylum and the people of Cincinnati need to stay inside and invest in security systems.

Yes, the NFL is full of assorted deviants, miscreants and villains from the alcoholics and exploiters at the executive level down through the hired hands. Perhaps it simply mirrors society in general; perhaps it doubles or triples it. The Snake didn’t really do much to show up on the police blotter and I think there needs to be a bit of perspective here.

I realize that if it bleeds, it leads, but this has less blood than your average classic Disney flick, yet it was covered like the invasion of Iraq. It’s #25 on the list of Reasons Why the Republic Fell.

Dr. Bob Mantooth is a Denver based free lance writer/security consultant who kindly offers his wisdom on sports and society to Station Charon on a weekly basis.

Down To Chinatown

GUILTY!

Religion as they say is the last refuge of a scoundrel and a shaken Kenny Boy was reportedly overheard muttering that "God's got another plan right now" to his family after the verdict.

The good news is that Enron swindlers Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were found guilty on charges of fraud, conspiracy and other felonies for their bilking of millions out of billions in one of the greatest corporate ponzi schemes in world history. Enron was a serpentine bunco game with tentacles stretching into nearly every rigged market and financial mini-scandal of our time, ironically sentencing has been set for September 11th, unfortunately the death penalty is not an option because flim flam men like Skilling and Lay deserve to be strung up by their balls and then disposed of in a public execution (is it too late to propose legislation bringing back the guillotine?) for not only their roles in the Enron scam but for whatever involvement that they may have had in setting our disastrous domestic and foreign policy in Dick Cheney’s top secret energy task force meetings. "certainly we're surprised, this is not the outcome we expected" moaned Kenny Boy but not to worry, George W. Bush’s benefactor and former golf buddy will be right up there next to Scooter Libby on the list of pardons come January 2009. He knows were too many bodies are buried for it to be otherwise.

ET TU BRUTUS?

In a perfect example of what happens when you lay down with wolves longtime conservative icon and powerbroker Richard Viguerie voiced his discontent with the Bush administration in a scathing editorial that ran in Sunday’s Washington Post. Viguerie, a founding father of the right-wing movement as well as one of the dirtiest of the dirty Christo fascist bastards unloaded on the Bushites for their failure to focus enough attention on installing an all out theocracy and for not fighting the culture wars with enough vigor to satisfy the restive rubber fetus crowd. Now feeling betrayed he lashed out in a very ugly public manner, threatening to keep the regressive bible thumpers home come November to ensure that the corporate crony packed GOP congress goes down and sends a message to God’s own idiot who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Among some of the editorial’s blasts are:

White House and congressional Republicans seem to have adopted a one-word strategy: bribery. Buy off seniors with a prescription drug benefit. Buy off the steel industry with tariffs. Buy off agribusiness with subsidies. The cost of illegal bribery (see the case of former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham) pales next to that of legal bribery such as congressional earmarks.

In today's Washington, where are the serious efforts by Republicans to protect unborn children from abortion? Where is the campaign for a constitutional amendment to prevent liberal judges from allowing same-sex marriage?

Instead of conservative action on social issues, the Republican-controlled House has approved more taxpayers' money for an embryo-killing type of stem cell research. And it passed a "hate crimes" measure that could lead to the classification as "hate" of criticism of homosexual activity. And in the Senate, Republicans have let key judicial nominees languish, even when Bush has nominated conservatives for lower courts. Would a strong Senate leader such as LBJ have let his party's nominees fail for lack of a floor vote?

And...

I've never seen conservatives so downright fed up as they are today. The current relationship between Washington Republicans and the nation's conservatives makes me think of a cheating husband whose wife catches him, and forgives him, time and time again. Then one day he comes home to discover that she has packed her bags and called a cab -- and a divorce lawyer.

As the philanderer learns: Hell hath no fury. .

Strong words from a man used to getting his way, you would think that Karl Rove would have been in Viguerie’s office pronto sucking up and kissing his ass but amazingly the Bushites did something very unusual (at least when it comes to the Richard Vigueries) and went on the counterattack with the usual slime tactics by releasing a talking points memo listing Viguerie comments that criticized the hallowed Ronald Reagan and used their FOX bully pulpit to have White House lackey Brit Hume basically denounce him as an old and pathetic has been:

"Viguerie may no longer hold much influence with the Republican Party, but he has a history -- and he has a history of disillusionment with its leaders. In 1981, Viguerie said Ronald Reagan's Cabinet choices -- quote -- 'gave conservatives the back of the hand' and complained that Reagan allied himself with -- quote -- 'the liberals, the Democrats and the Soviets.' Viguerie later said of Reagan -- quote -- 'the emperor has no clothes on. Just about every conservative I know is now acknowledging it.' "

As the saying goes, be careful when you lay down with wolves because they eat their own and if the ruling junta is capable of shanking a longtime ally like Viguerie in the back they will sell out their own grandmothers.

Finally and most importantly: In a triumphal moment that showed the world that true democracy still exists in America despite the whining of the damned liberal media to the contrary a New American Idol was crowned on Wednesday!

Dirty Yellow Journalism

Iran Jew Badges=Black Propaganda

The drumbeat of anti-Iranian propaganda rolls on with of course more inflammatory Jew bashing attributed to the regime of president Machmood Ahmadinejad. This time a false and extremely scurrilous story has been making the rounds in the blogosphere and right-wing websites and even receiving editorial placement in some papers by staffers with dubious intent and an obvious ideological agenda. The story states that the Iranian parliament, at the command of Ahmadinejad has recently passed a law requiring Jews and “other religious minorities” aka fundamentalist Christians to begin to wear colored strips of cloth on their clothing as a form of indentifying themselves. Shades of the Third Reich, the story practically screams Holocaust and all that is missing are the concentrations camps. The covert operation to transform the Iranian hardliner into the newest version of the ‘New Hitler’ is as the think tank phrase goes “picking up steam” and now that Saddam Hussein has been dispatched somebody has to take the place of the modern incarnation of Der Fuehrer and expecting the MSM to pin the label on George W. Bush is as realistic of expecting Joseph Goebbels to call Onka Dolph ‘The New Satan’.

My local newspaper which long had been independent, a rare and vanishing breed in the days of media consolidation, corporate greed, yellow journalism, government propaganda disguised as news and sensationalism that belongs in checkout stand tabloids has slowly been taken over by the disease of newsless news and unsubstantiated conjecture through a losing battle of attrition given retirements and reassignments of key members of the editorial and news staffs. Yesterday morning it has officially joined the club of state run corporate press propaganda organs when a prominently placed editorial ran comparing the recent allegations on Iranian anti-Semitism to what else, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust while referring to the story on the mandatory wearing of badges as an identifier. This is entirely consistent with the anti-Israel message that is being attached to Iran and it's democratically elected president, the U.S. media takes quotes out of context and hypes any insinuation that Iran has declared that the state of Israel is an enemy as if that comes as any big surprise when it comes to any other country in the Middle East...they ALL hate Israel ! The cynical choice to callously and shamefully exploit the Holocaust to further foreign policy initiatives shows an amazing lack of regard to the true victims of anti-Semitism which thanks to Bush's war is enjoying a resurgence everywhere and dishoners the memory of the millions of Jews who were murdered by Hitler's Nazi regime.

The fact of the matter is that the story is such an obvious piece of black propaganda (along the same lines as the 'babies in incubators' yarn back in the leadup to the first Gulf War) that most mainstream news outlets (other than the usual sensationalism driven cable channels like FOX) found it to be so problematic and riddled with red flags that they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Rupert Murdoch’s Newsmax and The Drudge Report were on it like flies lighting on dogshit though and the reactionary right wing hate bloggers were pounding their keyboards with a frenzy usually reserved for pounding their puds over pictures of Ann Coulter to disseminate this story that was nearly immediately debunked. The original source, The National Post of Canada was rapidly backing away from the story as though it were an unexpectedly encountered rattlesnake on a nature trail.

There has been an onslaught of attempts to paint Ahmadinejad as a dangerous anti-Semite who is on a divine mission to ensure the destruction of the state of Israel for months now which of course could be expected given the neocon alliance with hard core elements within the Israeli government who want to see Iran eradicated and are all too willing to trade in the currency of the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes by exploiting American sympathy and guilt in order to bolster public support for another bloody, ruinous foreign misadventure that Bush in his messianic mindset and the influential support of a Christian Zionist base of fundamentalist loonies bent on inciting a nuclear conflagration and therefore kicking off the events leading to the absurdity that is the Rapture will buy into it and nuke Tehran.

I was so pissed off that I did a rare thing, I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of my local paper, not that it will likely see the light of day, the bastards don’t like to be called on their bullshit especially when it was their lead editorial despite the story not appearing elsewhere in the paper. It reeks of the activity of an inside operative on their editorial board and conjures up comparisons with the infamous Operation Mockingbird where the CIA utilized paid plants throughout the domestic press to disseminate agency propaganda. There was an excellent story done back in 1977 by Carl Bernstein the Washington Post Watergate reporter who didn't sell out. This is hard to find anywhere so hopefully the following link works, it did yesterday but you know how it goes with the creeping censorship of the internet:

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

I am even more pissed right now due to the double dipping, first my tax dollars are used to finance covert propaganda and then I have to pay to read it through subscribing to my newspaper. Nice Racket!

Incidentally, the incessant lying, the court packing, the NSA being used to spy on journalists and just all of the creeping fucking fascism that we are having rammed down our throats by Bush's jackbooted thugs also pisses me off.

But of course I am in the minority in a nation of sheeplike drones.

And besides, even if the story had contained more truthfulness than disinformation regarding the Iranian parliament passing such a bigoted and hateful measure wouldn’t the act be at least somewhat morally equivalent to those of our own domestic demagogues in congress who are seeking to defile our constitution with discriminatory amendments targeting taxpaying American citizens based on a deep seated loathing of their lifestyle?

The Looting Spree: Part Two

The New Gold Dream
The Looting Spree: Part Two

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Friedrich Engels

When George W. Bush signed off on the latest round of tax cuts earlier this week he just as well could have used a blood dripping dagger instead of an expensive Monte Blanc pen, the symbolism would have been entirely appropriate given that he once again stabbed the poorest of America’s families and the a besieged middle class trapped under a crushing debt burden in the back. The largess of the tax cuts were once again bestowed upon the wealthiest of the wealthy while the poor slobs at the bottom of the barrel received a pittance, I hope that those making below $30,000 a year can find a good use for the whopping $10 a year that they will reap from Bush’s latest grant of to the rich. In America socialism is only evil when used as a pejorative towards programs that are beneficial to those most in need of some sort of a helping hand but is perfectly ok when applied to corporations, the wealthy and churches. Such are the contradictions of a modern society that has lost its moral compass. The utter audacity of G.W. Bush in sitting behind one of the trademark corporate style banners this time reading 'Tax Relief For All Americans' during a public relations ceremony while surrounded by millionaire pigs like the HCA family's Bill Frist while rewarding the 'haves and the have mores' of his base is so blatant and shameless that even the Gipper is rolling over in his grave. With their relentless assault on the middle class in favor of the rich the GOP should change their mascot from a bloated elephant to Uncle Pennybags of the board game Monopoly.

Cutting taxes in the face of rising deficits and costly foreign interventions is not only bad fiscal policy but it is insane, like a dying man running up his credit cards to the hilt on wine, women and song because he knows that he will be long gone when it comes time to pay the bills. There is more at play here than the mere political game of buying influence although that is certainly a part of business as usual when it comes to the long history of crony capitalism that is a Bush family heritage. There are ideologies at work here, hidden agendas to eliminate all progressive social programs and advances of the past century, as Grover Norquist famously puts it the goal is to eventually “starve the beast” by shrinking government to the “size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist is the head of the affiliation of tax dodgers and pathologically cynical cheats operating under the façade of legitimacy as ATR or Americans For Tax Reform but should be more accurately labeled Armed Thugs For Robbery.

I never could understand the tax cut fanatics and their very flawed ideology when it came to allowing the rich to weasel their way out of paying for the infrastructure of the system that allowed them to become rich. Theoretically the cutting of taxes on the wealthy is sold on the faulty premise that freeing up more capital should allow for reinvestment back into the system and therefore create jobs but theoretically Santa Claus is also able to transverse the world in his sleigh loaded with enough gifts for millions in one night dragged through the sky by the power of flying reindeer and Jesus Christ is supposed to walk on water, turn water into wine and feed the masses with two loaves of bread and a fish or two. The Christ analogy is especially fitting because a loaf of cheap bread and a can of mercury infested tuna fish is what a growing percentage of American working class families are expected to exist on while their more fortunate counterparts gorge themselves on lobster washed down with costly imported wine. The reinvestment myth as is most of the other right-wing propaganda simply bullshit. The wealthy do not put sufficient income back into the economy to create jobs, they never did and certainly do not now when all barriers to global trade are being destroyed, they invest their money back into a market expecting returns that force corporations to cut costs by seeking the lowest paid workforce and sending American jobs overseas therefore doing more long term harm to the economy than the good promised by the snake oil salesmen that they install in the congress and the White House.

Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is usually always dead on when it comes to exposing the frauds that are the wealthy tax chiselers and their Potomac prostitutes, this is a wonderful piece called the Tax Cut Con that I would strongly recommend. The biggest con of all is to reinstate the age of dominant big business capitalism that laws promoting a more egalitarian type of society need to be eliminated to create the sort of vast underclass that is necessary for an extremely wealthy elite to exist and to not only hoard their wealth but to once again be able to pass it down through generations, thus the need for the elimination of the estate tax which has been masterfully repackaged as the ‘death tax’ by Republican party propagandist Frank Luntz and spun through their media echo chamber as a menace of intrusive government that affects far more Americans that it in fact actually does, those with estates are valued in the millions the so called ‘death tax’ affects approximately 1 % of the population and it is a handful of ultra-rich families who expect a return on their investment in the form of political donations to the corrupt legislators who serve as their agents.

In an especially ghoulish example of just how low that Republican legislators are willing to stoop here is the following story from Time Magazine on how Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions sought to capitalize on the human misery left in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last September in order to find a body of a wealthy individual in the wreckage in order to use as a prop with which to make a case against the estate tax, this should make any rational moral person nauseous:

Looking for a Corpse to Make a Case

Senators look for a wealthy casualty of Katrina as evidence against the estate tax

Federal troops aren't the only ones looking for bodies on the Gulf Coast. On Sept. 9, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions called his old law professor Harold Apolinsky, co-author of Sessions' legislation repealing the federal estate tax, which was encountering sudden resistance on the Hill. Sessions had an idea to revitalize their cause, which he left on Apolinsky's voice mail: "[Arizona Sen.] Jon Kyl and I were talking about the estate tax. If we knew anybody that owned a business that lost life in the storm, that would be something we could push back with."

If legislative ambulance chasing looks like a desperate measure, for the backers of repealing the estate tax, these are desperate times. Just three weeks ago, their long-sought goal of repeal seemed within reach, but Katrina dashed their hopes when Republican leaders put off an expected vote. After hearing from Sessions, Apolinsky, an estate tax lawyer who says his firm includes three multi-billionaires among its clients, mobilized the American Family Business Institute, a Washington-based group devoted to estate tax repeal. They reached out to members along the Gulf Coast to hunt for the dead.

It's been hard. Only a tiny percentage of people are affected by the estate tax—in 2001 only 534 Alabamans were subject to it. And for Hill backers of repeal, that's only part of the problem. Last year, the tax brought in $24.8 billion to the federal government. With Katrina's cost soaring, estate tax opponents need to find a way to make up the potential lost income. For now, getting repeal back on the agenda may depend on Apolinsky and his team of estate-sniffing sleuths, who are searching Internet obituaries among other places. Has he found any victims of both the hurricane and the estate tax? "Not yet," Apolinsky says. "But I'm still looking."

The country and the politics of today bear much resemblance to the era of the Gilded Age and the rise of the Robber Barons, it’s always back to the future for the Republicans, if not with religion then with economics and the days of serving as a political party of the elite for the elite have returned. It is an appropriate analogy given the immensely influential Karl Rove's alleged fascination with power broker Mark Hanna the man behind President William McKinley and the rise of corporate power and monopoly that led to the social stratification of that period. The original Gilded Age was marked by systemic corruption, business monopolies, disproportionate distribution of wealth, terrible working conditions, extreme poverty, hunger, child exploitation, political disenfranchisement, taxation without representation (unless you feel that some shifty, underhanded liar whose primary attibute is that he stays bought is an acceptable public servant) and harassment of dissenters. The exact same situation that we have now come full circle to today as peasants in the land of King George the Second. The current establishment and this includes the feckless DLC hacks of the shameful 'opposition' party' don't stand for anything when it comes to the masses of the working people, they only serve their masters and to borrow a quote from the great Hunter S. Thompson solely represent:

"The systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

The current buying and selling of political influence has resulted in a true culture of corruption that goes well beyond the scope of any lame glass house dwelling DLC consultant's marketing phrase. We have a Gilded Age style spoils system controlled by the wealthy, the corporations and their lobbyists and lackeys the likes of Jack Abramoff, Norquist, Ralph Reed and every former politician who leaves or is voted out of office only to find immediate lucrative post congress employment as none other than a lobbyist for an industry that rewards those who have served it by acting as an insider to manipulate the system to its favor. Today's political establishment is as vile, tainted and reprehensibly corrupt as any in U.S. history and this goes for both major parties, one is only a bet better at hiding it and less brazen and arrogantly fascist than the other. The impurity and taint of Washington is evident wherever one looks or is able to look given the great drive for reclassifying information, redacting reports, manipulating figures and studies and the intense drive to use fear to shroud the workings of the government in secrecy and pack the courts with facist jurists who have risen through the filtering process precisely because they have been servants to the system rather than impartial arbiters of the law who can be counted on to rule favorably for the criminal perpetrators of the looting spree whenever a case manages to make its way through the morass of the legal system.

The plague of corruption has brought war profiteering and illegal wars staged for the benefit of Bechtel, Haliburton and the other military industrial complex giants who traffic in the blood of the innocent and the naive through never ending imperialist ventures, the swindling of locals in the reconstruction of the city of New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina so that government contractors can pay the lowest possible amount to maximize their profits, the gutting of environmental protection laws, the deregulation and privatization of the energy industry and the resulting price gouging by the ponzi schemes of Enron and the unscrupulous greedmongers who run the oil companies and the crown jewel in the temple of corruption that is Washington D.C. - The K Street Project.

The vicious political machines of today rival anything out of the Gilded Age and make Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall thuggery look like petty larceny by comparison. The ruthlessness of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove's tactics turned the House of Representatives into a den of iniquity more along the lines of the old Soviet Politburo than anything with even a passing resemblence for American democracy. Brutality, arm-twisting, threats, intimidation, character assassination, marginilization and outright racketeering have been hallmarks of the House of Tom where brownshirts reigned supreme and enforced discipline with an iron fist. The Senate was filled with flip-flopping amoral millionaires like Frist, sycophants like Pat Roberts and Arlen Specter who could be counted on to stonewall any investigation into the criminal activity of the imperial regime of George W. Bush and shameless charlatans and opportunistic liars like John McCain and Hillary Clinton whose lack of scruples are surpassed only by their political shrewdness.

The names of the Robber Barons have of course changed , now instead of Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Rockefeller, Morgan, Astor and Frick we have Walton, Murdoch, Ellison, Gates, Icahn and a bevy of more Waltons and globalists who hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth. According to Fortune Magazine there are now 793 billionaires in world, a rise of over six hundred percent from twenty years ago when the stench of Reaganism was at it's strongest. The rise in the number of looters would never have been possible without their ability to buy political influence and the George W. Bush years largely shaped through the machinations and deal cutting of maestro Karl Rove. The oligarchy can count on one thing and that is that they will always be represented by their loyal servants in the nation's capitol, and for the rest of populace there is always a divisive social issue like abortion, gay marriage and now the new anti-immigration brouhaha designed to keep them fighting amongst themselves while the looters continue to pick their pockets and laugh enroute to the bank. Back then it was the Chinese on whose backs the railroads were built that were used as scapegoats, now it's the Mexicans, the more times change the more things stay the same.

Maybe one small thing to take solace in is that the Gilded Age eventually gave way to a progressive movement that set the stage for eventual reforms that allowed for the country to become much more inclusive and fair, the trusts were eventually reigned in and although much suffering was endured as a result of the early abuses of the Robber Barons and the corruption of the system but eventually prosperity and a strong middle class emerged to make the country great and a place where equality and a shot at having a better life than one’s forebears was possible, where prosperity and a an opportunity to share in the mythical American Dream was obtainable. The greedy wild boar of unfettered ‘free market’ capitalism had been kept in a pen but rise of the Social Darwinist Reaganauts and the resurgence of the crony capitalism of George H.W. Bush flipped the latch and opened the gate.

It is now up to the progressives to attempt to reverse the disastrous damage to the system that has been wreaked over the past quarter century or at the very least to halt the momentum. However the first step to recovery as alcoholics know is to recognize the problem, then and only then can corrective action be taken to salvage promise gone badly awry. This may prove to be a nearly insurmoutable obstacle given the degree of apathy and ignorance of the American people.

To Be Continued

The Mantooth Report: V.1.37

GRAB BAG

Barry’s still on 713…

Image is everything for the NBA, a league that jumped the shark in the 90s when the game was no longer enough and “total fan experience” became code for ear-shattering music that didn’t stop when the game started, $10 beers and dance teams full of scantily-clad skanks gyrating in front of five-year-olds. This is a league that has become desperate to play well in Red America, not easy to do in a sport that already trended 70% black thirty years ago. The perception in some places is that those damn negros make too much money, spend it all on dope and white women and don’t do nothin’ but dunk, i.e., it was a better game when Hot Rod Hundley played. The NBA is sensitive to this criticism (much of which is unjust—some of which isn’t) so it makes you wonder when some of the big stars do commercials that only reinforce the stereotype. Witness Vince Carter’s T-Mobile gig, in which a small white sportscaster asks Vinsanity for a few minutes of his time for an interview after the game. Carter agrees, but proceeds to spend the rest of the commercial on the phone, talking to person after person, presumably because he got such a great phone and has so many minutes to use. Meanwhile, Whitey in his suit waits and waits and waits. Now when you are a guy who has a rep for being a me-first gunner like Carter, a guy who quit on the Raptors to make them trade him, a guy who is selfish and soft, maybe this isn’t a bit you want to do. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but to me it makes him look like the world’s biggest a-hole, the antithesis of a stand-up guy and a winner. Then again, I’m not in the target demographic…

Even better is the new Haynes commercial starring America’s favorite baller and pitchman, Michael Jordan and… Kevin Bacon? Yes, that is Kevin Bacon of Footloose and Animal House and Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon fame sporting flowing lettuce and a variety of Haynes products. I can hear the pitch now from the ad guys… “See, MJ and Kevin live together and every time Kevin tries to throw something in the trash, MJ comes out of nowhere to reject it. It’s hilarious. It will sell tons of underwear!” To quote J. Seinfeld, “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?” I mean, under what weird circumstances would these two guys hang together, let alone live together? Bacon with a guitar? Is he some kind of musician now? Is there an opening in Keanu Reaves’s band that he’s practicing for? Nothing says Jordan like two guys hanging out together in their underwear. Now don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with two guys living together that way and if MJ and Kev want to get some more plants, a couple of cats and grow matching facial hair, good for them. There could be up to four gay marriage measures on the Colorado ballot this fall and the Doctor is definitely in support of civil unions, etc. I just don’t think this is the vibe that MJ was going for, unless he’s trying to sell more underwear to gay men across the USA.

Our last stop on the ad campaign trail is Nike’s semi-controversial “Witness” campaign. Now this is riling up the Christian Right (is there a Christian Left?) because of its borderline blasphemous connotations, including the subtle comparison of James to Christ which may be a bit of a stretch. For his part, James has been silent both in the press and in the series against Detroit. I think Jesus would have shot better than 2 for 11 down the stretch of Game 5 – Jesus has a hell of a jumper. Thankfully for Bron Bron, the rest of his supporting cast of misfits stepped up and are one game away from shocking the heavy favorite to win the NBA title. When guys like Anderson Varejo are taking charges and getting the call instead of erstwhile MVP candidate Chauncey Billups, you know something is in the air. (ABC really wants James in the Finals, um I mean the refs are calling good games.) Look, I think Lebron is a great player already and he’s only 21, but he isn’t quite Jordan yet and perhaps all the attempts by his sycophants in the media to portray his supporting cast as the Washington Generals might be a wee bit of hype. They have the Pistons on the ropes and it’s about to become a very bitter spring in Motown.

The first two rounds of the NHL playoffs featured exciting hockey and left us with these Conference Final matchups. Buffalo – Carolina and Edmonton – Anaheim. Who outside of these four cities and the 51st state of Canada cares? There isn’t one compelling series or potential Finals among the lot and OLN’s ratings are going to go even lower, if it’s possible to go down from 0.0 that is. No Devils, no Wings, no Avs, no Stars, no Rangers, no Senators, no Flyers, no viewers. It is the equivalent of Arizona, New Orleans, Jacksonville and Baltimore in the NFL’s final four. The thump you would be hearing would be network executives throwing themselves off of tall buildings.

When the Redwings have yet another disappointing early playoff exit, does that mean Hockeytown just becomes Town? (I stole this from some guy who called in the Jim Rome show about five years ago. Just wanting to give proper credit – I ain’t no James Frey.)

The DaVinci Code is getting ready to be released and has supposedly begun to draw less than rave reviews from the hacks that screened it at Cannes. Now I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing since the critical acclaim and box office success of most films seem to be inversely related, but I will laugh if the thing bombs. First, I am a negative person who enjoys failure, especially when it is large and spectacular and lays the mighty low. (Moment of Self Realization: Does this make me a true member of the media? Oh God, I think I need to go take about five hot showers in a row!) Second, the studio is trying to have its cake and eat it too by making a film about the whole “Jesus was really married and everything you’ve been taught is a lie” controversial (and bestselling) novel, but not offending the Catholic Church, fundamentalist Christians and other assorted zealots and fanatics. Third, because Tom Hanks looks like CU Professor Ward Churchill, for God’s sake, a look that is only good for picking up undergrads that are rebelling against their parents. I read the book and what can I say, I’m not a fan. Dan Brown keeps the pages turning, but as a writer, his craft leaves a lot to be desired and he must have naked pictures of his editor to get away with the grammatical crap he pulls. This is the exact same plot as his earlier novel Angels and Demons (and if you think Code pisses off Herr Ratzinger, how about a book where the Pope’s Chamberlain, who happens to be his illegitimate son, murders the Holy Father and engineers a plot to annihilate the Vatican with an anti-matter bomb in order to get himself elected to the Tiara - about as plausible as anything you would find on a neocon website, but I digress) with the same characters and some new “art” stuff thrown in. It’s a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories that have been floating around for two thousand years. Is it right? Shit, I don’t know, but I tend to be skeptical of people who bust out with these great truths that are supposed to refute all history up to that point – i.e., Hitler’s alleged homosexuality and Judas just following Jesus’ orders. History is a compilation of sources and those sources are often contradictory. Who do you believe? Most sources from the last years of Rome throughout the Middle Ages are from monastic chroniclers like the monk Bede or the courtier Froissart. These guys compiled material second or third-hand – how accurate is that? The Bible had more books in its original conception than it does now – who decided what to keep in and leave out? The Church did and the Council of Nicea did back in the fourth century and just because it happened seventeen-hundred years ago doesn’t mean they got it right. Just because they condemned Gnosticism and Arianism doesn’t mean the resulting doctrine of the Nicean Creed was pure or true. So I don’t know if Dan Brown is full of shit, or if Herr Ratzinger’s army of cardinals isn’t telling the truth. I don’t care and I don’t care what you believe. But let’s remember that The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction (and not a particularly good one) by a writer who is a hack and has been accused of thieving the idea from someone else. The fact that it gets people reexamining the pile of crap we’ve been served for centuries is a good thing, but if you accept it as gospel without some critical analysis, you’re just as accurate as the bishops sitting at Nicea in 325.

Dr. Bob Mantooth is a Denver based free lance journalist and independent security contractor who sees fit to kindly offer Station Charon his wisdom on sports and society on a weekly basis.

A Mexican Hat Dance

King George appeared on the electronic crackpipe last night (much to the dismay of those avid fans of (Deal or No Deal) and issued a decree that thousands of members of the already depleted National Guard will be rapidly dispatched to the relatively safe assignment (at least in comparison to taking fire in Iraq with faulty body armor) of the U.S.-Mexico border to join forces with the band of racist, paramilitary, beer-swilling, rebel flag flying redneck yahoos that are the Minutemen in order to enforce border security. Another bait and switch from the snake oil salesman in chief because there was no similar sense of urgency was given to rounding up the 11 million illegal immigrants who serve as the backbone of Bush’s crony capitalist network of domestic sweatshops.

With the GOP base fragmenting like a Texas steer’s grass-hardened turd breaking up in the torrents of the Rio Grande this is a desperate attempt to pander to the wet back hating bigots now that the freedom hating theocratic gay hating bigots are increasingly making noises about the holy chalice of a much alluded to constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage not being trumpeted by twenty nine percent George who has been stuck holding the flaming bag of dog shit that is a growing distrust of the Republican party among Hispanics. At this point the besieged and possibly soon to be indicted (unless he rolls on Cheney) maestro of manipulation and agit-prop Karl Rove would probably eagerly perform unspeakable acts of perversion and bestiality in the legendary ‘Donkey Show’ in order to pull Generalissimo El Busho’s ratings out of el bano.

Shit, maybe Junior could join fellow gringo Karl down in Jaurez, Tijuana or whatever other south of the border shithole where Dubya once ran amok snorting coke, fucking whores and injesting mescal and peyote to the point where he actually saw God (or was it Charlton Heston’s Moses) doing a Mexican Hat Dance to the tune of Santana's Soul Sacrifice way back in the good ole days prior to GWB becoming the Manchurian Candidate. Times have changed for Dubya, back in his day the border when it came to his own questionable service in the National Guard was at least from his personal standpoint was a standard destination for drunken debauchery.

This is of course a satirical seque because nothing this lurid could possibly be true :

Houston, TX 1972: Junior was flying high again, Mushmouth Shoutin’ by Z.Z. Top blared from the Mustang’s 8 track tape deck as it roared across three lanes at 75 mph, merging onto I-610 and narrowly missing a Caddy with Bat-mobile fins filled with blue hairs from Beaumont. The prodigal son was returning from yet another long weekend south of the border. The Bolivian marching powder was kicking in again and the kid was beating the red-eyed monster back with whiskey and beer. Soon he would be back home and he would be able to sleep it off for a few days and to get his system cleaned up just in time to report for guard duty where he would heroically fly a desk for the weekend.

He had been reminiscing about Matamoros where he had spent several days engaged in the type of drunken debauchery that you just couldn’t find in America, even if he was a child of wealth and privilege. That sumbitch father of his would go off on another rant about Junior being a god damned disgrace and a drunken embarrassment that would ruin his nascent political career. The booze and cooze were both cheap and plentiful and daddy’s spies weren’t everywhere like they were in Big H. Junior liked getting his groove on south of the border and took off whenever time allowed. He headed to Mexico for the type of cheap, kinky and degenerate sex with underage girls that the old man just wouldn’t think was cool if he were to stay around the homestead. His dick would practically point the way as he would make the run for the border…and he wasn’t going for any fucking enchirito…no sir, he was going for the all you can eat hair-taco buffet. The entertainment was boss as well, the strippers performed live lesbian sex acts on stage with dildos and the works and for a few pesos they would give him the private show back at the hacienda. Junior also really dug the fabled donkey show…and it was just fucking amazing how big it’s dick was.

“YEEEEE-FUCKING-HAAAAAA!” roared Junior as he knocked back another belt of Wild Turkey draining the pint bottle and hurling it into the back seat which elicited a sick thud, he slammed his fist down on the ‘stang’s dashboard, “FUCKIN’ PARTY”.... There was a groan and then a pudgy figure clambered over the passenger seat, rolled down the window and stuck his head out, making violent retching noises”

“Jesus Christ Turd Blossom….ya jist can’t take it with the big guys kin ya?”

‘Turd Blossom’ was Junior’s sidekick, inseparable was he from the young scion’s side.

Little did Junior know, but TB had serious longings for him, he was in fact a closeted homosexual.

The movie Midnight Cowboy left a lasting imprint on TB’s psyche, he had become so uncontrollabley horny during the scene where a young Bob Balaban blew Jon Voight’s Joe Buck in a Times Square movie theater that he actually walked out, he was not alone as moviegoers in 1969 Ft. Worth, TX were shocked and horrified at the film’s lurid content, most of them diehard Baptists unbelieving at the incomprehensible sins being splayed out in 70 mm on the screen in front of them. In abandoning his seat during one of the first graphically displayed man on man sexual encounters committed to film he was not alone, what did however separate him was that instead of braying hellfire and brimstone at the poor concession stand clerks, ushers or anybody who would listen he ran to his pale blue VW bug, locked the doors and jerked off to the beat of a Jerry Lee Lewis song on the radio.

“Here, take a hit of this shit…it’ll make ya feel better” said Junior as he fished a doobie out of the Marlboro package that was sitting on the dash and punched in the lighter.

Junior stuck out like a turd in a punchbowl with his prim and proper transplanted eastern elitist family.

Junior swung the mustang into the circular driveway, narrowly missing the backside of his mother’s Cadillac.

Mommy was sitting on the plush sofa, jabbering on the telephone and chain smoking Kools, a half full green glass ashtray rested on the end table.

Daddy was furious as Junior stumbled through the door reeking of stale booze, illicit sex, reefer and the pungent stench of moral rot

“I can’t possibly express how disappointed that I am in you, you are on the wrong road through life son”

“This is the last fucking time that I am bailing your ass out……do you know what an abortion can do to my political career?”

“Fuck You!” , screamed Junior….”let’s get it on right now old man!”

“Who in the fuck do you think that you are? The president? …you’re an asshole” shouted Junior.

Junior then wound up and took a big roundhouse swing at his father who due to his tennis playing was far more agile than the clumsy and inebriated son. Daddy stepped to the side and Junior continued to flail like a pinwheel until he smacked into a chair, bounced off and then went crashing into the china cabinet, shattering hundred year old family heirlooms and making a noise so horrific that it downed out his mother’s horrified scream of “FUCK”. Junior went down hard at his poppy’s feet.

Junior grunted and looked up at his father, his eyes glowering with Oedipal hate, then he groaned, rolled over and vomited on the floor.

Daddy just shook his head and thought if it weren’t for me this boy will forever be a fuckup.


I am tormented by fever dreams like this and regularly awake screaming and bathed in a cold sweat to a nightmare, I am sure that I share that affliction with at least a small percentage of fifty fucking million other Americans if you have any faith in Diebold at all. I just try to stay half drunk on cheap beer and semi-sedated on Xanax most of the time, it’s a hell of a lot easier to self medicate than try to deal with the freak show that is the sordid crazy quilt 'reality' of post 9/11 Amerika that resembles a cross between Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, Ridley Scott’s classic 1984 Apple Computer commercial, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Father Knows Best, The Flintstones and American Idol. We jumped the shark as a decent society capable of making any sort of enduring contribution to the good of the planet long before those planes took down the twin towers.

Were the American Gestapo known as the NSA/CIA intelligence alliance not illegally monitoring journalists like some tinpot Stalinist secret police organization God only knows how low that Bush’s real poll numbers would go. Of course there will always be the dead-enders, dug in like Alabama ticks feeding off of the fecal residue on the matted hair around a goat’s asshole but every society has it’s Lumpenproleteriat, it’s thugs, it’s miscreants, it's losers and it’s failed revolutionaries. Twenty nine percent is a bit high even when taking into consideration the abysmal intelligence and free floating fear and hatred of this most insipid public whose mere presence in this country are an absolute fucking insult to all of those who died in the name of preserving civil liberties but can’t even be bothered to get their asses out from in front of the goddamned television or to put down the X BOX controller. Now those are the fuckers who should be deported! We’ll keep the illegals, just send those fucking losers as far away as humanly possible to where they are no longer capable of fucking us all through their inactive disengagement and apathetic ignorance.

The utter nausea and pure loathing that I felt last week after the NSA phone record story broke and the subsequent timidity and shrugging of shoulders that I encountered from people who I work with was pretty damned telling as to the state of America today...nobody gives a rat's ass about surrendering their civil liberties as long as they are protected by the strong daddy government from the shadowy terrorist menace that they have been indoctrinated by an incessant deluge of propaganda to believe is everywhere and wants to kill them because they hate them for their freedoms. The very freedoms that they don't care about trying to preserve.

It's a complete disgrace that there is so little emphasis placed on the teaching of even the most basic concepts of civics and history in this terminally ill society.

The media spin seemed to be that insurance companies and other business interests already had the information so it was no big deal, unfortunately most of the sheeplike Good Germans in post 9/11 Amerika fail to make the connection that insurance companies don't also have police power and a complete disregard for the concept of Habeus Corpus as well as an increasingly depraved Jones for serious sexually perverse torture. It somehow wasn't important enough to mention that the insurance companies don't have police power though. These are shameful days to be an American and I am often more disgusted with my fellow citizens than I am with the rogue government of the Bush-Cheney junta.

And finally, I don’t happen to tune in to Larry King Live very often but given the presence of DLC shill Ed Schultz and liberal Air America firebrand Randi Rhodes who is a fucking vengeful goddess along the lines of Taarna from the classic animated movie Heavy Metal it was a must see if only to see the combative Rhodes take down some outgunned little right-wing douchebag mouthpiece. Unfortunately it was like watching puppies being drowned in a bucket because the best that the right could come up with was some little fruitbag named Ben Ferguson who I have never heard of in my entire fucking life.

This was the biggest laugh that I had all week, I nearly pissed my fucking pants at the sight of this loser, he was a dressed very similar to the ludicrous dork with the Malcolm X style bowtie Tucker Carlson but it was his fucking ‘do' that really got me….I never realized that Newt Gingrich had a Mini Me of his own just like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers flicks!

Jesus Fucking Christ that was funny…..then again I have a pretty fucking sick sense of humor.

Watching the Bushists is as absurd and surreal as dropping acid, sucking on a boda bag filled with Yukon Jack as if it were a big tit and then going to see an off Broadway performance of ‘Springtime for Hitler’. I seriously doubt that any of the hallucinations that either Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerry Garcia or the poor bastards who were fed LSD for 77 straight days in one of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments that the fanatically degenerate mad scientist Sid Gottleib were able to induce would ever come close to the bizarre world distortion of mass reality that is peddled to the public in the guise of policy by crazies like Karl Rove and his better half George W. Bush.

War Is Peace,

Ignorance Is Strength,

Freedom Is Slavery,

In God We Trust.

The Mantooth Report: V.1.36

GOAT

WARNING: Liberal Arts majors and moveon.org members, this column contains statistics from the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia. Yes, numbers! Don’t be scared, but prepare yourselves for the ride and any Seamheads will be disappointed because I am not using Sabrmetrics.

Sometime soon, maybe tonight, Barry Bonds will hit home run number 714 and then 715 and pass Babe Ruth. There is an air of inevitability to the fact and there will be no reprieve, no last second call from the governor to prevent this execution from occurring. It seems unreal and hopeless, like the build up to the Iraq war and the hope that someone, anyone, would be able to step up and prevent a catastrophe from occurring. But short of Bonds going down with some type of career-ending injury in the next few hours or going OJ and having a slow-speed chase with the CHP with a roided up Greg Anderson at the wheel, we are doomed.

We are doomed to a wave of shameless ESPN promos for Barry’s new reality show, a show in which ESPN gave him complete control over and sold the remnants of its journalistic integrity over. We are doomed to Bonds’ apologists, ass-kissers and whores exulting in his tainted accomplishment. We are doomed to seeing the bad act of a bad actor who most us not living in the Bay Area wish would just go away and leave us alone. (And don’t get me started about the racism at play here, where the breakdown for and against on talk radio and in the press seems solidly along racial lines. If you support Bonds merely because he’s black you are as big a racist as the crackers who hate on him for the same reason. This is the TO argument all over again – so much for the fleeting improvements in race relations done in by Lee Atwater and his Big Tent.)

But I don’t really have the stomach to rehash the Bonds on roids argument here. If you want to, go read Game of Shadows, go read Jeff Pearlman’s new biography of Barroid and make up your mind. Barry’s supporters rant that there is no proof that their boy ever did the deed, that the evidence is circumstantial. Well, boo-fucking-hoo, but if circumstantial evidence wasn’t admitted as proof, half the convictions in America wouldn’t occur. You can’t always find the smoking gun, but you can build a wall of circumstance to prove a point beyond a reasonable doubt, and only those with a vested interest in Bonds, Inc., believe that burden has not been met.

What I really want to touch on is the argument of Bonds vs. Ruth, of how Bonds is somehow the greatest ballplayer of all time, the GOAT, if you will. Please. Bonds doesn’t make the top three and I am including his artificially enhanced stats. John Feinstein made a distinction on the radio the other day of being the greatest versus being the most important. I think Ruth wins on both counts. First, let’s dismiss the pretenders and let’s stick to what happened between the lines.

Ty Cobb was a bad guy, sort of the Barry of his era. He was a racist and hated pretty much everyone. He also hit .367 (the highest lifetime average) and stole 896 bases and he put up that average during the dead ball days. In 1910, Cobb hit .385 and the American League average was .243. In 1911, the new cork-centered baseball jumped the AL up to .273 and Cobb to .420. In 1917, Cobb was at .385 and the league was back down to .248. However, he didn’t hit for power, even in the lively ball ‘20s and his defense was erratic at best. And he never won a championship and hit only .262 in three World’s Series.

Ted Williams was the last man to bat .400 (.406 in 1941) and hit 521 homers when the 500-club meant something and hadn’t been crashed by the likes of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Williams lost five years in the prime of his career to World War II and the Korean War, so you could boost his numbers even higher. But he never won a title and was an indifferent outfielder and, while he may have been the best hitter ever, wasn’t even really considered the best player of his time.

Joe Dimaggio was that player. He has the titles and the lore and his numbers are impressive despite losing three years to the war and playing half his games in a graveyard for right-handed batters. Yet it’s hard to separate the player from the hype machine that is New York and something about those 361 lifetime homers fall just a bit short of the top spot. After all, Williams did hit 521 playing in a park that was similarly ill-suited to his strengths. Maybe if the alleged late-night trade of Williams for Dimaggio had actually gone down, both would have hit 700.

Hank Aaron in many ways is the Lou Gehrig of his era. Gehrig was always overshadowed by Ruth, just like Aaron was by Mays. Gehrig and Aaron were both quiet and unassuming and poor Hank played in media wastelands like Milwaukee in the 50s and Atlanta in the 60s and 70s. Aaron was a great all-around player and the numbers are amazing given the era when he played. 755 homers, a .305 lifetime average, 2,297 RBIs for first all-time, 2,174 runs scored for second. Remember, for the first half of his career, the Hammer played half his games in the Milwaukee Coliseum, a pitcher’s park. How much of this was mitigated by finishing up in the launching pad of Atlanta is up for grabs, but consistently putting up 30 – 40 HRs a year in the offensively deprived 1960s is nothing to sneeze at. But (and there is always a but) these are numbers that accrued over 23 years in the bigs, often out of the limelight. It’s hard to see Aaron as a better ballplayer than Clemente or Mays and, outside of his local market; you can’t find many people who believed that either. The race is not always to the swift and such consistency is remarkable and admirable, but not necessarily a hallmark of being the best ever.

Barry Bonds has the numbers now, although given the context of his era, perhaps they are not so amazing. Yet Bonds was almost the total package – he was a three-tool player, a guy who could steal 50 bases and hit 40 homers, he could make contact when needed and was a daring baserunner. But he couldn’t throw a lame Sid Bream out from short left field in the bottom of the 9th of Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS. One of the most revealing stories is that Pirate’s centerfielder Andy Van Slyke motioned him to play in on Francisco Cabrera and Bonds responded by shooting his teammate the bird and playing back and the last chance for a Pirates’ pennant went down due to his selfishness. Being a turd is not supposed to factor in to this analysis, but when your turdishness manifests itself in costing your team its biggest game in years, I think that applies. Barry also has as many titles as I do and is notorious for his MIA appearances in the postseason. In fact, the only time Bonds had a good playoff run was after he had been allegedly introduced to those two good friends, Mr. Cream and Mr. Clear.
Who did I leave out? Well, pitchers because even the best pitcher can only take the ball every fourth or fifth day. You can have the greatest pitcher ever, but they don’t count as everyday players. In the future, maybe a reliever will, but again can we really make an argument for Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer ever, as GOAT over Bonds? Over Ruth?

I omitted Mickey Mantle because I don’t think he belongs in the top tier. He’s right on the edge and if he hadn’t been hurt and had taken care of himself, maybe he could have cracked the top five. But the scent of unfulfilled potential hovers over Mantle and if you don’t live up to the hype (admittedly unfair hype because the Mick was an awesome offensive force and a first-ballot Hall of Famer), how can you be the GOAT?

Finally, I didn’t address the Negro Leaguers, some of whom deserve consideration. Guys like Oscar Charleston and maybe Josh Gibson were top players. But (and this should really be treated in another column), if you choose to denigrate the accomplishments of white ballplayers for competing in the segregated majors, how can you trumpet Negro League achievements when they were not achieved against the best of the best, either? How can you accept Negro League statistics that were kept in a haphazard manner and rarely were ever officially compiled but sneer at the “white” stats that were kept by the Baseball Writers of America? Many contemporaries of both colors considered the Negro National League and the Negro American League to be AA quality ball (equivalent to today’s AAA); with a top cut of talent that was definitely major league quality. How can we say Gibson is the greatest ever when he competed in the equivalent of the American Association or the PCL? It’s not his fault. It was a horrible crime to prevent these men from playing in the bigs (although Satchel Paige made far more money barnstorming than he would have playing for any major league club) and it shouldn’t be glossed over. But you can’t make these guys saints and angels either and ignore the facts in an attempt at some kind of belated baseball version of affirmative action. A good read is Charles Alexander’s Breaking the Slump, a study of depression era baseball for those of who can handle books without pictures in them.

Maybe I would put Bonds at number five behind Aaron and Dimaggio -- maybe ahead of Joe D. That Barry is a great player is undeniable, but if the Hammer had played in the same era, the HR record would be 855, not 755. The changing of the strike zone in the early sixties blighted the offensive numbers of a generation of players, including our first finalist for the title of GOAT, Willie Mays.

I believe Mays was probably the most spectacular ballplayer ever and, unlike his godson Barry, was a real five tool guy. He won a batting title (hitting for average), led the NL in homers three times (hitting for power), speed (four stolen base titles), and has a plus arm and defense. Mays hit 660 home runs playing fourteen years in the worst place for hitters in the league – San Francisco and losing two seasons to military service. If Willie hit 30 bombs each of those years, that puts him at 720 without even adjusting for the San Francisco factor and the pitching-dominated 1960s. Mays defense was superb and he was a tremendously clutch player – the anti-Bonds if you will. The great catch in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series has been played over and over, but even better was the throw that kept the lead run from tagging and scoring on that play. In Game 7 of the 1962 World Series, Mays came up in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a man on first and the Giants trailing the Yankees 1-0. He doubled into the corner and only the wet grass and a great defensive play by Roger Maris kept the tying run from scoring. When has Barry ever stepped up like that? Bonds’ lifetime postseason batting average is .245 with 9 home runs – eight of which came in his prime juicing days of 2002. Mays has a title and the respect of his peers and he’s my favorite player of all-time, which would be enough to beat out any mortal, except that the Babe isn’t just any mortal.

Babe Ruth hit a record 54 home runs in 1920. Only one other team surpassed that total – the Phillies who played in the Baker Bowl, a band box with a right field fence that was 280 feet from the plate down the line. The total number of homers in the AL was 369 –Ruth hit 15% of all bombs in the league that season. When Bonds hit 73 homers in 2001, the NL total was 2,952, so Barry hit 2% of the total. You say there are more teams in the League now? Fine, let’s cut the total in half – 1476, but let’s adjust for Barry playing in a 162 game season and the Babe in a possible 154 games. So Barroid gets 69 of a potential 1,476 jacks, or 4.6%. In order for Bonds to have the same relative effect that Ruth did in 1920, he would have needed to hit over 220 homers. Bonds pathetic playoff numbers pale in comparison to the Babe who hit .326 with six more homers and 9 more RBIs in seven fewer games. Oh yes, Ruth won seven titles – which is seven more than Barry.

But let’s throw out the batting, because every hitter has big stats or they wouldn’t be in the conversation. Let’s equalize defense, because most defensive statistics are misleading, subjective or are a function of a team’s pitching staff (for example, fielding percentage doesn’t measure balls you don’t get to, assists tend to be skewed toward guys with bad arms because no one runs on Willie Mays, and put outs, etc. are affected by weather a team’s pitchers give up more fly ball or groundball chances). Besides, people who are used to seeing the fat jolly Ruth of the late 20s and 1930s forget what an excellent outfielder he was earlier in his career.

Let’s talk about pitching, because Ruth could have been one of the best ever. Ruth the pitcher in his first full year in 1915: 18 – 8 with a 2.44 ERA and 16 complete games. 1916: 23 – 12, 1.75 ERA and 41 starts, the latter two stats leading the league. 1917: 24-13, 2.01 ERA and a league-leading 35 complete games. 1918: 13-7 with a 2.22 ERA in only 20 starts. Sure, the ball was deader and league ERA was way lower than today, but 78 wins are 78 wins in any time period.

Ruth the pitcher in the World Series (remembering that there were no other playoffs until 1969): 1916: 1-0 with a 0.64 ERA because he went the distance in a 14 inning win over Brooklyn. 1918: 2-0 with a 0.87 ERA, his record string of over 29 scoreless innings finally snapped by the Cubs (and later broken by Whitey Ford). Yes, Ruth pitched three games and gave up an average of 0.87 earned runs.

This is where the conversation must always stop. No one else has shown greatness from both the rubber and the batter’s box in this fashion. Bob Lemon was a outfielder before he became a Hall of Fame pitcher and hit over 30 homers in his career, but he would have had to hit another 500 and won another 150 games before he could approach Ruth. No one is even close; no one has ever done both.

The Babe’s records may be broken, but until you find me someone who dominated both ways, he’s the obvious choice for GOAT ahead of Mays. Barry can hit 800 homeruns, but he’ll always be number four at best and dead last in the heart of anyone with a brain.

Dr. Bob Mantooth is a Denver based free lance journalist and occasional drinking body of none other than 'Jammin' Jimmy Dobson who kindly offers his wisdom on sports and society on a weekly basis.

The Looting Spree

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do…

Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders..
…and then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

Bob Dylan: Desolation Row

The other day at my local grocery store there was a big sign with red letters taped to the front of the service desk:

WE NO LONGER ACCEPT ROLLED CHANGE!

People are having to dig much deeper these days now that gasoline is tickling the lower end of three bucks a gallon again and it’s going to get far worse before it gets any better, summer is on the way and the oil companies always love to stick it in right around the Memorial Day weekend anyway to further goose their obscene profits by using the increased holiday travel as an excuse. Then there is the little matter of the messianic maniac in the White House who is still making very ominous noises about not only bombing Iran but using a nuke in the process which will surely do wonders to improve an already dangerous Middle East situation that is precariously balanced on the brink. Hell, any attack on Iran (especially if it involved the Israel) would push it over the end of the cliff and the civil war that has turned Iraq into an abattoir will certainly spread throughout the region and the oil company/military industrial complex whores like Bush and Cheney will be cackling all the way to the bank while their energy conglomerate sponsors slowly bleed the rest of us dry while the majority cower from the threat of shadowy 'terrorists', cave in with no opposition to illegal surveillance and continue to graze on the ever depleted wasteland of what used to be the field of American dreams.

A wider conflict with escalating hostilities would have potentially catastrophic consequences for an economy that has in reality for the average American worker never approached the heights that the hyperbole and feel good propaganda that is churned out by the Wall Street and the Bush administration grifters and their shills in the mainstream media lead the public to believe. The failure of the media to do anything other than to regurgitate administration propaganda based on statistics that have been rendered irrelevant through manipulation and outright deceit. Whether it is described as being Robust, Booming or Picking Up Steam, the hyperbole about the economy is as consistent in the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ of the mainstream media propaganda organs as it is fallacious. The entire economy is built on debt, a masterfully perpetuated con job that is only going to eventually collapse like a house of cards were any sort of outside event like a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or a major disruption in world oil supplies caused by a widening war to occur.

A bombing of Iran would drive oil prices into the stratosphere and further deplete the ability of the working poor to make ends meet by driving up the prices of everything else that needs to be transported…and then there are the monster hurricanes that will soon be bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico. But with the Bushist junta apparently hell bent on attacking Iran you can rest assured though that the Rapture Bus will be fully topped off and will keep right on revving the engine.

Of course as it always is in post-Reagan American it is the poor who pay the burden first, we saw it in the despicable racist treatment of the warehoused poor in New Orleans and we will see it again as gas prices lay waste to them as well as the working poor who due to deceptively false official economic stats from the ministry of financial propaganda are in some sort of limbo. They will be the first the ones forced into sacrificing.

One of the saddest things that I regularly see is the tableau at the little convenience store that I regularly stop by to pick up milk, beer or bread on the way home from work are the poor folks who stand around the counter desperately buying lottery scratch off tickets which are their version of a chance at economic survival, even if it comes a few bucks at a time but mostly they just lose, the lottery is a perfect metaphor for the American system it is set up that way, in order for the super rich to prosper and purchase their pieces of heaven in outlying gated communities there needs to be a vast underclass. The store which owned by naturalized Americans happens to sit at the rear end of a large trailer park. Now in the state where I happen to reside the worst place to live is in a trailer park of any type right now. The rapacious developers and speculators have been revenously descending like vultures in search of a rotting carcass to light upon the parks in order to buy the land out from under the poor old folks in order to build more fucking high priced condos and throwing residents out for a pittance of their initial investment.

The retired elderly are the ones who my heart bleeds for, they played the game, bought a ticket and took a ride on the riverboat and in the end were sold out by the unscrupulous scum whose hostile takeover of the system that they were always told would be there for them for their participation in building this nation through the good years and then was cruelly yanked away from them like so much teasing of a puppy with a chew toy, they are the biggest victims of all in this state sanctioned swindle.

The other obvious victims of the looting spree are the nation’s poor minorities, hidden away and banished from any sort of meaningful government statistics by the professional cookers of the books. The startling aftermath of Hurricane Katrina peeled away a bit of the façade on the lie of American prosperity by showing the flooded city streets filled with the dregs of our society, those who have been shat out by the system of rapacious laissez faire Capitalism, and George W. Bush, the son of generations of privilege whose initial lackadaisical reaction to the woebegone, the sick and the dying in the big soup bowl full of snakes and bloated dead bodies that was once the Crescent City was a dead giveaway to exactly what compassionate conservatism means, it’s just another two word phrase similar to the far more popular bull shit.

The mostly black victims were left to fend for themselves amidst gangs of thugs, with no food, water or medical assistance in the streets of the Big Easy while Bush, even though he had been warned of the potential for such a catastrophe busied himself with campaign style public relations appearances in the aftermath until it became apparent that the political damage would be greater than the benefits of pandering to the party base. It is more than a bit ironic that his agenda in the immediate aftermath of the storm was to strum a guitar in San Diego and make a speech in Arizona further promoting the agendas of both his and his extreme upper-crust benefactors by pandering for campaign cash and pimping his Social Darwinist programs to undermine programs of the New Deal and Great Society that have been targeted for termination with extreme prejudice by party ideologues.

The hugely influential GOP activist Grover Norquist has been a standard bearer for the ruling class. He advocates the "starving the beast" theory to essentially shrink the government through increased debt and forcing the cutting of social programs that would undermine the legacy of FDR. Incidentally Norquist is also one of the biggest proponents of the Reagan Legacy Project which would enshrine the father of the ultra right wing greed that is cutting a swath through American society like a malignant cancer. He wants to see Reagan enshrined throughout the land in the greatest implementation of revisionist history ever foisted off on the public, this would include replacing FDR on the dime with the Gipper. Norquist and his wealthy benefactors certainly have allies in their crusade against progressive society. The worthless and detestable Republican rubber stamp congress only yesterday passed yet another tax cut for the rich, this time for $70 billion adding to the already staggering debt load and burgeoning deficit and sending the message that sacrifice in a time of a costly and tragic war is only for the little people.

Despite the big lie told by Norquist and his Reagan worshipping Social Darwinists, trickle down economics has only one meaning when it comes to those at the bottom of the economic ladder and that is that they had better grab their umbrellas, Gulliver is pissing on the Lilliputians again.

To Be Continued

Armageddon Or Bust

The utter disdain which the Bushists have shown for the personal letter to the man who doesn’t like to read and would rather spend his time fishing on his phony Texas ranch from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as telling a sign as to what the end game of these fucking criminal lunatics is as the looming appointment of Air Force General Michael Hayden as CIA director. Hayden is only slightly to the left of Curtis LeMay, a man so determined to nuke the Soviet Union that he was the model for a character in the classic movie Dr. Strangelove. Now that Bush family lackey and incompetent stooge Porter Goss, an actual former spook has been sent suddenly packing without explanation (rumor has it that he may be involved in the Watergate-defense contractor-prostitution scandal at some level) and allowing the sinister John Negroponte to further consolidate his own power. The USA Today story that the NSA has been secretly working in conjunction with corporate telecommunications giants AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to tap the phone lines of millions of Americans (including YOU if you are reading subversive shit like this blog, the links to the story are disappearing faster than virgin teens in an Alabama trailer park though and I have already had one post deleted from another site on it) shows just what the government expects in trade from corporations for all of the favorable legislation and deregulation that is thrown their way. This is the way that things really are when you pull your head out of the electronic wonderland on television.

As for the complete dissing of Ahmadinejad's letter and the subsequent vilification of its content by the MSM propaganda machine to include references to holy war what else could be expected from this fanatical junta of Rapture cultist fundies whose messianic visions have so coincided with the goals of radical Israeli Zionists who are as hell bent on blowing Iran to kingdom come as radical Christian fundamentalists are in kicking off the fiery conflagration that would according to their bizarre interpretation of scripture bring about the reture of Christ that Washington should just as well be known as the ‘Knesset on the Potomac’. Of course this will get me tarred as being a die hard anti-Semite by the Israeli Lobby as well as denounced by Christian Zionists the likes of Falwell, Robertson and their ilk but as my old buddy ‘Statz’ used to so eloquently put it “you can’t fuck with the truth”.

Hardliners in Tel Aviv have likely been pissing their pants laughing for quite some time over how easily that the terrifyingly over-influential cult of Hal Lindsey/Timothy LaHaye dead enders are to manipulate and just how much of a fool that the Junior Bush is when it comes to whispering the absurd concept that he is God’s own Earthly instrument into his ear, of course by proxy through the neoconservative fascists who effectively control our foreign policy. Fuck, they never would have been able to play the old man like that!

Back in Der Homeland: I just read a piece by MSNBC's Howard Fineman on the GOP strategy for the coming elections and here is a quote:

"Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grassroots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent."

There you have it. It's all going to be local and while Hillary's Temple Eunuchs aka the DLC Doormat Dems are making their big plans to lure the fence sitters with lame GOP lite bullshit and denouncing DNC Chair Howard Dean for reaching out to the base instead of derriere smooching to the corporate elite Karl Rove is going to turn every local election into a mini fucking Stalingrad.

I personally hope that the DLC is not only wiped out but suffer such a total humiliation that it causes them to flee from the political scene once and for all. Those lousy Vichy bastards are nothing more than the palace guards for the true enemy and we will never have a shot at taking down the fascists and instituting the necessary reforms with a bunch of pusillanimous pussies who continue to show up for a Wild Bunch style gunfight with a few of Zell Miller's soggy spitballs and some warmed over chickenshit rhetoric and expect a different result than the last time they got their asses kicked.

In an interesting note FOX boss Rupert Murdoch is hosting a fundraising event for Hillary Clinton, as Pete Townsend once sang meet the new boss same as the old boss. Do you see why the 'Culture of Corruption' theme is doomed now?

Down with the DLC !!

Times Change

Iran may now be public enemy number one on the neo con Bush administration’s hit list but much like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq the U.S. government yesterday danced a pale, moonlit dervish with the devil of today. Not that history matters to Americans, God forbid that anyone acknowledge that there was well over two centuries of it before 9/11 conveniently allowed those whose interests would be best served by not only revisionism but by a complete whitewash to hit the reset button.

Back in the 1980’s there was a little soiree called the Iran-Contra affair where the ‘Dutch’ Reagan Mob was not only selling arms to Iran but was using the proceeds to illegally finance paramilitary death squads in Central America by running an end-around on Congress. There is some speculation that weapons sales were also a part of the legendary October Surprise a secret deal with the Iranians to release the hostages but only after the November 1980 elections so as to not give incumbent Jimmy Carter a boost that would have allowed the disease of Reaganism to be nipped in the bud. This of course has never proven but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen, most covert operations don't have a tendency to be noticed unless some sort of catastrophic fuckup occurs, otherwise they are a success because their very design is to maintain secrecy.

Colonel Oliver North figured prominently in this lurid episode in U.S. history and parlayed his criminal involvement into a lucrative career as a fascist radio and television demagogue. Ollie was a hero to the most extremist elements of the right-wing in America and at some point after his conviction and subsequent overturn on a technicality but it’s a complex issue and I am not going to go into the entire process for the obvious reasons of lack of time and space here so I’ll save it for another time. But there’s more, somewhere along the line the fact that it was a total waste to fly back empty planes that had just dropped off weaponry North and company had a brainstorm and decided to get into the cocaine business by flying loads of marching powder back into the U.S.

And who better for North to turn to than General Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian strongman who was ousted and imprisoned during Operation Just Cause by U.S. troops and Daddy Bush back in 1989. Noriega in addtion to being a viscious and ugly goon was a former longtime CIA operative who assisted in furthering U.S. foreign policy in the region (often by participating in terrorist actions) so he would be an obvious choice to use as an accomplice in a drug trafficking scheme like this. However Manny got greedy and knowing way too much became a liability that had to be eliminated much like Saddam would later on and now he sits rotting in prison and unable to tell his tales that would implicate key figures in the Contra crime spree allegedly including Daddy Bush among others.

By the way, if anybody wants to truly get a good grasp on exactly why the country is as fucked up as it currently is I would strongly suggest doing some research on the long, sordid history of U.S. imperialism in Central and South America as well as some digging into the past of the CIA which as an agency is really pretty much nothing more than Wall Street’s Gestapo. There is a boatload of information out there.

But I digress, our government was pretty damned cozy with the Iranians at one time and this was after the hostage crisis. And what did Iran do with some of the weapons and explosives that were being sold to them? Engineered a devastating terrorist attack by providing material support to radical group Hezbollah which then pulled off a suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and followed that up a few months later by blowing up a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in the same city killing over 240 U.S. servicemen.

Blowback’s a bitch and you can continue to expect more of it because our pathetic excuse for foreign policy acting as a facilitator for plundering corporate interests and as a golem for the Israelis is not exactly the sort of thing that wins the hearts and minds of those who are being conquered, hauled away or murdered in the streets of their own countries in the name of forcing global ‘free market’ capitalism and ‘democracy’ down their throats at gunpoint.

We create our own monsters, Osama Bin Laden was a useful asset in Afghanistan when he was engaging the Soviets, Saddam was once deemed to be a good enough of a guy to be sold weaponry to use against Iran, was once awarded the key to the city of Detroit and to shake the hand of Donald Rumsfeld.

Times certainly do change even if the clowns running the circus don't.

Ragged Dick

According to media sources a very disturbing little piece on the human embodiment of the military industrial complex that is Dick Cheney himself is about to be released in the June issue of Vanity Fair magazine (allegedly as a part of a story about his relationship with lesbian daughter Mary) and Americans should be utterly horrified at the crazed behavior of the man who is arguably the most powerful individual on the face of the planet.

This is far worse than simply getting shit-faced and shooting a hunting buddy at a secretive soiree in the Texas woods and then failing to report it (ostensibly to allow 'Vice' to sober up but far more likely in my own opinion to allow some of the more unsavory guests to make their getaway so as to not be involved in the mess). Cheney seems to like to do business in wilderness settings, like the great duck hunt with Fat Tony Scalia where a deal with the devil was likely inked in order to ensure a favorable ruling by the SCOTUS on the top-secret energy task force. The Cheney-Scalia excursion always reminded me of the gathering in the movie Hoffa where the great outdoors male bonding session was merely a pretense to conduct criminal activity. Considering that the documents in question stayed under wraps it appears that Cheney’s Louisiana safari with Scalia was a ringing success and who better to barter with than the sleazy reprobate troll Scalia whose service as an impartial ‘judge’ is so tainted and morally vile that he doesn't only deserve impeachment but also needs to be tried as the sleazy mafioso that he truly is alongside the rest of the Bush family crime syndicate if justice ever returns to this land.

Anyway, according to the press release from the magazine:

National Editor Todd Purdum reports that Cheney travels with a chemical-biological suit at all times. When he gave his friend Robin West and his twin children a ride to the White House a couple of years ago, West commented on the fact that Cheney's motorcade varied its daily path. "And he said, 'Yeah, we take different routes so that "The Jackal" can't get me,'" West tells Purdum. "And then there was this big duffel bag in the middle of the backseat, and I said, 'What's that? It's not very roomy in here.' And [Cheney] said, 'No, because it's a chemical-biological suit,' and he looked at it and said, 'Robin, there's only one. You lose.'"

Also reportedly in the Vanity Fair piece:

"He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function.'

"At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece."

Holy shit! I always imagined that Cheney was just some sort of ultra-villain, someone that could be a real life version of a character out of a James Bond movie along the lines of an Ernst Stavro Blofeld but this takes the evil to an entirely different level now that it is apparently accompanied by serious psychosis. Of course the MSM will ignore as it has done to pretty much everything else (other than missing white teenage girls, murderous pederasts, Tom and Katie updates, natural disasters and tragic industrial accidents) for the past five and a half years of Hell on Earth. It would be far too much to expect that any bummer stories that Dick Cheney is not only as crazy as a shithouse rat but is a seriously delusional paranoiac with a death wish and an itchy trigger finger determined to get down to nut-cutting time with Iran. It certainly wouldn’t take much for Cheney to coax the messianic man himself to suddenly realize that nuking Tehran would be the fulfillment of his mission to God by kicking off Armageddon and the Rapture.

No, the real stuff about Dick Cheney is just far too much too handle for most of the credulous, infantile and outright ignorant populace of this apathetic nation of fantasy obsessed haters, disengaged consumers and butt sniffing lemmings.

But as Colonel Jessup once said “You Can’t Handle The Truth”

The Cheney travelling carnival of perversion was out on tour last week doing his best to re-ignite the long dormant passions of the Cold War by blasting Russia with inflammatory rhetoric which undoubtedly was very much to the liking of fellow dead ender Donald Rumsfeld who was busy being called out as a liar by former CIA agent Ray McGovern during an appearance that the media not only downplayed but in the case of FOX actually re-cut the footage to accommodate the besieged Secretary of Defense. Big Dick is always the attack dog, always the man sent out to fight the battles of George W. Bush, a spoiled ‘Richie Rich’ type of a rotten little prick who has been accustomed to a lifetime of having others play bodyguard in order to avoid getting himself soiled or otherwise punched out.

Whenever ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ wants to appear to stay above the fray it is Cheney who rides to the rescue as the chief boss of the pack of surrogate, sycophantic pit bulls who slime and destroy any and all opponents. Darth Cheney can always be counted on to launch into an anti-American display of incendiary rhetoric whenever the need arises, he has nearly blown out his aorta in excess of fifty six times over the past half decade with rabid onslaughts of totalitarian bile spewed with aplomb while polishing the turd of the neo conservative death cult’s failure of a bloody goddamned war.

Cheney routinely blathers denunciations in a phlegm choked semi-roar that is accompanied by a finely dispersed spray of venomous spittle, calling Democrats “opportunists peddling cynical and pernicious falsehoods” and tarring dissenters as unpatriotic wussies and terrorist sympathizers who are incapable of understanding that all has changed in the post 9/11 world. Cheney can always be counted on to crawl up the mast like a mutant spider and dutifully tighten the ropes that hold the American flag firmly tethered to the pirate schooner of Republican fascism, corporate dominance and nationalist imperialism.

WELL JUST FUCK DICK CHENEY!

Treasonous, anti-American vermin the likes of Cheney whose naked greed is surpassed only by their lust for power should according to the great words of author Dalton Trumbo:

“Be hanged and drawn and quartered and paraded through the streets in small chopped up little bits and thrown out into the fields where no clean animal will touch them and let their chunks rot there and may no green thing ever grow where they rot.”

You know, hanging is far too good a fate for despicable pig-fucking traitors the likes of Ragged Dick. The drawing and quartering however would be far more appropriate for a contemptible bastard who spends an inordinate amount of his spare time cowering in some rat-hole secure undisclosed location bunker where he likely sits around slowly fondling himself over a damp, dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf while fantasizing about becoming the grand poobah and de facto emperor of a secret underground government that would replace Jeffersonian democracy with Straussian deceit and Hitlerian repression.

How in the hell did we ever get to the point where we as a country could become so morally depraved that we would allow a sleazy, immoral, unpatriotic, morally deficient, perverse, evil, greedy, criminally insane piece of shit like Dick Cheney slime his way into the White House on the coattails of the idiot bastard son of a former president to begin with? Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are God’s plague upon us all, a pox that will likely never be erased in the lifetime of any living reader of this posting. So contemptible has their repudiation of over two hundred and thirty fucking years of American values been that we will forever be tainted as a people, this bullshit has irreversibly damaged us both within and outside of our borders.

The bastard’s cardiologist should be declared public enemy number one.

The Mantooth Report: V.1.35

THE BITTER END

Another Nuggets season has gone down in flames and the sporting equivalent of federal investigators are sifting through the charred wreckage and looking for the black box. While three consecutive playoff appearances may be commonplace for teams like the Spurs, it isn’t anything to sneeze at given the wasteland the franchise wandered through between the end of the Mutombo era and the drafting of Carmelo Anthony. Nevertheless, three consecutive 4-1 first round exits tend to sully those accomplishments and the way this latest team imploded left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Only the Nuggets could capture their first division title in 18 years and blow whatever karmic goodness thus accrued in the span of three weeks. The playoff loss to a superior Clippers team wouldn’t have been so awful if it was the result of a hard-fought six or seven game series. Unfortunately, only two of the five games were even close and it was primarily a return to the walk-it-up wrestling match-style NBA of recent years. When the most memorable moment is Reggie Evans grabbing LA Center Chris Kaman’s yonger from behind and sparking a near-brawl, the action wasn’t quite fantastic.

So for the tens of you that care, let’s take a look at why this team, which was picked by many as a dark horse to at least make a run to the Conference Finals, flamed so badly…

1: Shooting Blanks – and not the kind of blanks that you can load up by taking Cialis or Viagra, either. The primary object of basketball is to put the ball in the hoop and the act of trying to do so is called shooting. I think we can all agree that shooting is an integral part of the game; seeing as how this isn’t soccer and you can’t win 0-0, it may be the most important piece. Since a shot from 23’ 9” is worth three points, outside and long-distance shooting is at a premium. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell whoever is running the team (and we’ll get to that in awhile.)

It was painfully obvious that after Voshon Lenard went down early in the 04-05 season, no one was a threat from outside. The team brought in a painfully one-dimensional Wesley Person to remedy this defect and it helped as a band-aid, but the inability to score from downtown led directly to the 4-1 playoff loss to the Spurs. So obviously the key mission over the summer was to bring in a shooter, right?

Well, if you consider spending $29 million on a third point guard in Earl Watson as Mission Accomplished, you probably own the George W. Bush doll complete with flight suit. Without a doubt, Watson was the Nuggets best shooter which is my way of damning the team with faint praise, of saying that essentially Watson was the tallest midget. Unfortunately, Coach George Karl never used Watson unless he had to and then shipped him to Seattle in a deadline deal. Meanwhile, Lenard never really recovered from his injury and became a cancer who was eventually exiled as well. This left Greg Buckner as the Nuggets’ top outside threat, the same Buckner who went 0 for 8 from beyond the arc in Game 3. And that was the game Denver won.

Denver went 38% from the field in the series and 22% from three-point land. The inability to shoot from outside let the Clips pack the lane and double and triple team Melo, who averaged 21 points a game, but only shot 33%. It was ugly, it was horrible to watch, and management has no one to blame but themselves for the debacle.

2: Too Many Cooks are Pissing in the Soup – After years of neglect, absentee owners and under funded corporations running the show, Kronke Sports Enterprises has been good for both the Nuggets and Avs. The big man is smart enough to leave the hockey side of the operation alone, but tends to believe he is some kind of a hoops expert. The hiring of Kiki Vandeweghe as GM was a coup and despite some noted stinkers (‘Skita with the 5th pick in a draft where Amare Stoudtmire went #8, Kenyon Martin’s max contract, etc.), Kiki has rebuilt the organization and given it an air of credibility that was sorely missing.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Stan began to sour on Kiki who is now a lame duck and probably will be gone in a month. Kiki wanted to sign Gilbert Arenas, a point guard who could score and push the pace and quarterback a run and gun offense. The two sides were close on money, but then Stan intervened and said no. Arenas went to DC where he has been a star and the Nuggets signed Andre Miller. Now Miller isn’t a bad player and he can sure fill up the stat sheet – if this was fantasy basketball he’d be a top pick. But those 15-20 points a night mask some serious deficiencies that don’t show up in agate type. Miller doesn’t like to run – he walks and dribbles the ball into the ground before finally jacking up a shot. He was the wrong guy for the kind of ball that Denver wanted to play and the reason he’s here is that the ownership went Jerry Jones on the GM.

Witness Jeff Bzdelik who led the Nuggets to a surprise playoff berth and then was allowed to twist in the wind before begin clipped when the team got off to its requisite slow start in 04-05. If Buzz wasn’t the man, then he should have been gone before the season started, but neither the GM nor the owner would make the call.

Finally, after a terrible interregnum where WNBA coach Micheal Cooper led the team, Kronke hired George Karl. Now Karl is a top coach and his respect for the city’s ABA roots is heartwarming, but there’s a reason George has made as many stops as he has in his career. His relationship with Kiki (which I call him not because we’re boys, but because I don’t want to keep typing “Vandeweghe”) is strained and rumor has it that the coach has the owner’s ear on personnel matters. Which is bad.

Coaches generally don’t make good GMs because they live in the now and make trades designed to win right away; trades that don’t look so good three years later when everyone is old and you have no draft picks. Giving Karl free reign is a terrible idea because this team doesn’t seem to be close enough to warrant putting all the eggs in one shot at the Finals.

3: Injuries- When Nene went down for the season on opening night it was shades of Calvin Natt rupturing his Achilles in 1986 and turning a contender into the #8 seed. Nene is the only post player on the team (which is inexcusable when you think about it) and, at the very least, was trade bait for a much needed shooter. Things went downhill rapidly with K-Mart’s knee and Boykins and Camby and Melo and Najera and pretty much everyone in the rotation getting injured at one point or another.

Kenyon Martin’s knee was probably the most serious hurt in that it basically turned a max-contract guy (and we can probably agree that 15 point scorers shouldn’t get max deals, but done is done) into a part-time player and set the stage for my final point…

4 : Mutiny on the USS Kronke – K-Mart didn’t want to practice because of his knee but wanted to play in games. This really doesn’t seem unreasonable to me since the games are important and it’s one thing if a guy is going Iverson and missing practice to sleep in or play Xbox, but an injury is another thing. After all, I thought the object was to win games, not practices. Anyway, K-Mart wasn’t getting his minutes and refused to re-enter Game 2 saying he “wasn’t no #$@# role-player!” (My regular reader will note that it’s not like me to shy from obscenity, but I do here because I don’t know what actually was said. I’m guessing something that rhymes with “sucker” and may or may not have had “mother” attached.) Karl suspended him for the rest of the series and when the Nanny-Stopper Reuben Patterson came to K-Mart’s defense in print, Karl didn’t play Rube for Game 5, thus cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Now I’m not arguing K-Mart and Patterson aren’t a couple of turds and hopefully they will be floated out of Denver on the next good flush. Whoever is in charge should call up Isaiah Thomas and trade K-Mart for one of the Knicks expiring and bloated contracts. Martin has numerous run-ins with teammates, coaches and the media all season and is a prime culprit in creating the deep divisions that wrecked this team. If Melo wants him gone, he needs to go.

However, even though the Clippers were a better team, this was a winnable series. Suspend Martin for Game 3 – fine, Denver won without him and was playing with house money at that point. Bring him back for Game 4 because even though the team seems better without him, Martin was the one guy that could defend Elton Brand. Perhaps the collapse was inevitable, but why go into battle without proper forces? Is he George Karl or Donald Rumsfeld?

Again, I like Karl and think he’s a good coach, but he needs to bear some of the blame for this disaster. He is the coach. He is one of the few NBA coaches that have the contract and stature to impose his will on the malcontents that every team has. He needed to come down hard on the problems, but he waited until things were too far gone to help. He needs to be held accountable and paired with a strong GM who will have the long-term best interests of the organization in mind.

But it ain’t gonna happen and the current composition of the team is currently untenable. We’re going to have to destroy this village in order to save it. Back up the truck…

Dr. 'Bob' Mantooth is a Denver based free lance writer and independent security contractor who kindly offers his wisdom on sports and society on a weekly basis.

Remember Duh Alamo

Many Americans who had their raging nationalist passions inflamed and their long held view of themselves as an exceptional people openly challenged by Monday’s massive immigrant rallies across the country were hitting the radio airwaves and blogosphere with a vengeance in order to vent about their newest scapegoats and threatening a similar boycott of Cinco De Mayo Day on Friday. With the level of animosity being what it is it's only a matter of time until violence starts to break out, hate crimes against Hispanics are on the rise and a game called Border Patrol which is the most heinous and pointless violent video game since the LaHaye ‘Christians’ unleashed their shooter style offering is now making it’s rounds on the internet and it gets the ringing endorsement of notorious neo Nazi and white supremacist Tom Metzger who said:

“I told a Mexican activist that he better be happy that we’re just playing a game on computer, because the temper of thousands…is reaching the boiling point”

Great, I am sure that in addition to Hitler that Metzger is a huge fan of Tom Tancredo, Bill Frist, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander and the rest of the right wing demagogues using the immigration issue to toot their own horns as they jockey for political advantage as the biggest supporter of bigotry in the land.

Unfortunately as is the norm in post 9/11 America the underlying causes of the immigration issue are completely ignored in favor of the simplistic emotional issues on the surface that are as easy to see as they are to mobilize resentment against. The big question is why do the Mexicans and others come here in the first place? The real issue is that the dummies in the dumbest fucking nation in the entire fucking history of the world are once again juked out of their shoes by the globalist elite who incidentally are the same treasonous looters who are offshoring our jobs, destroying our domestic manufacturing base and waging total class warfare under the guise of populist ‘values’ wedge issues are the ones luring and hiring the illegals to drive down wages in order to increase their precious fucking profits.

Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox asked Gordon Gekko in the classic movie Wall Street "How much is enough?" The answer is that to the overstuffed capitalist pigs of the rentier class is that there is never enough. Wouldn’t it be nice to start similar video games to Border Patrol where you can gun down the ‘suits’ instead.

As far as the boycott of Cinco De Mayo Day by all of the anal-retentive angry white alpha males goes they can just go and moan softly into their piss warm mugs of Budweiser and play ugly racist computer games and maybe even do drive-bys at their local Pepsi Co. owned Taco Bells that the miserably stupid miscreants mistakenly believe to be Mexican restaurants They are the same losers who think that shopping at Wal Mart is patriotic despite loading their carts with the cheap imports that have built China into an economic colossus to be reckoned with and feared in the event that they tighten the spigot on the easy money that has underwritten the American culture of indebtedness.

Me, I’ll be kicking back and eating burritos with guacamole and pico de gallo, knocking back a few Coronas, reading some Marx and cheering for the Latino team who unlike the dumb-assed society of indentured servants and celebrity cultists who are the natural born citizens of the good ole US of A truly understand the royal fucking that they are getting from the neo-liberal freemarket fanatics and their shitty anti-labor trade pacts. While the silly assed paramilitary groups like the overly publicized and over rated ‘Minutemen’ build their ridiculous little border walls that prove once and for all that they are the biggest pricks in the state of Arizona not on the end of cactuses or sitting in the U.S. Senate the offshoring machine continues to eat away at the economic future of this country. Shit, why don’t the perpetually miserable pricks just get a life or go and join the fucking Army and be all that they can be instead of pretending that slapping a stupid little yellow ribbon magnet on the tailgates of their pickups and SUV’s actually means supporting the troops.

If you losers really want to support the troops just march your ass on down to your local recruiters office and sign on the dotted line ole hoss, be a man for a change, grow a set of balls and go shoot at something that shoots back. Viva La Tancredo and chinga tu madre and long live the Sons of the Dirty Sanchez !

American Hero: In a day when the word hero has been so cheapened Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central which has become a more reputable and consistent source of news for most than any MSM outlet just let it fucking rip at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. This one will forever be immortalized and condemned and you have to see it to believe it. By the way the ‘liberal’ New York Times didn’t even see fit to mention Colbert’s sardonic diatribe in a major story on the event which should come as no surprise since they also once featured Scooter Libby's kinky fuck buddy Judith Miller as a real reporter instead of the criminal administration toady that she was in being an active participant in ratting out Valerie Plame. Bush had just brought down the house with his cornball duet with impersonator Steve Bridges but once Colbert launched into his routine all that could be heard was the sound of scattered applause, occasional laughter, the clicking of forks on china and the puckering of assholes.

Here are a few excerpts from Colbert’s brutal assault on the fascist junta in power and the feckless losers (except Helen Thomas of course) who are so pervasive in the White House Press Corps:

"The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man's beliefs never will. And as excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News"

"Listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction."

Judging from the look on King George’s face when the lambasting was over Colbert has just earned himself a primo spot on the pickup lists for the black vans once the crackdown comes along with a nice orange suit and a room at Hotel Gitmo. The right wing pundits of course roundly denounced Colbert, funny but weren’t these the same guys who applauded phony dude rancher Don Imus for savagely skewering Bill Clinton way back when? Ah the sweet, sweet smell of hypocrisy.

You can get the video Here:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/29.html


Bitchslapping Condi: Pity poor Condi Rice, just back from Iraq and ready to roll out the carefully rehearsed spin and talking points about the wondrous journey to a newly democratic Baghdad on the Sunday morning talking head circuit and she is cut off at the knees by her predecessor Colin Powell. Powell played the rude houseguest , spoiling Condi’s PR party by bringing up the inconvenient little fact that he like the real generals and not the civilian chicken hawks or suck ass sycophants had requested more troops during the initial invasion. It's pretty apparent now that not heeding his advice was one of the thousands of errors that Rice drew fire from Rummy and the neo con establishment a few weeks back for acknowledging.

Ouch...take that bitch! Condi was knocked off message and into damage control mode but you have to give the woman one thing, she has the capability of laying out a line of bullshit that could fertilize the Sahara, she even has that little Ollie North style hitch in her voice down to an art form, her image master Karen Hughes has done well in creating a product that is palatable to the masses. Dr. Rice was back on track in pimping the coming attack on Iran and accused that country of "playing games" over the newest version of the smoking gun that may come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Rice also left open the possibility of an attack without the backing of the U.N. which should go over real well with China and Russia considering that apparently neither of them back sanctions or military action against Tehran. It would be miraculous at this point to have any sort of debate on exactly why are we so intent on risking World War III by our insistence on being Isreal's Golem?

The one thing that I really find hilarious is the punditry speculating on Condi running for President on the GOP ticket in 2008 or even replacing Dick Cheney prior to that if he is forced to step down for 'health matters'. Give me a fucking break. How to YOU think that a Condi candidacy will go over in the South? Do you really think that the Republican party is going to throw away nearly four decades of a phenomenally successful strategy of catering to yahoos and racists?

And in the HUGE NEWS STORY of the day:

The Roberts Supreme Court rules in favor of Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy model and degenerate gold digging bitch who latches on to eighty something millionaires and sucks their shrivelled dicks for what at one time appeared to be a quick buck. Smith had remarkably slimmed down and looked much closer to her fuck bunny past than the grotesque,overstuffed fat pig whose bizarre cable television show made here a household name in peckerwood country.

Did she suck fat Tony’s cock this time?

That’ll give the suckups and fuckups in the White House Press Corps something to cover while waiting for their new master Tony Snow to show up and dispense tastie morsels. Hey, it’s not that Scotty McClellan went down in flames for being a liar, shit the entire fucking city of Washington is packed with more liars than a stray dog has fleas. The problem with McClellan is that he was a ‘bad liar’ who obviously had to go in order for a professional bullshit artist like Snow to move in and scratch the tummies of the disgraceful hacks and spineless losers in ‘the corps’ all except for that relentless monster in search of the truth Helen Thomas.