The War Comes Home: Another School Shooting, Another Normal Day in America

A rant concerning this latest incident: Twenty schoolchildren, eight others dead in Connecticut massacre One sign that your country is dying is that massacres of innocents by heavily armed psychopaths become normal. Now, America's fighting several blithely genocidal wars abroad, and trying to start several more, for the profits of the military-industrial complex that rules its empire. Sure, Barack Obama, blithe mass murderer of Muslims by drone and super soldier, cries for twenty innocent children in Connecticut. But none of us cries for the millions of innocent children in the countries America's conquering in order to steal their oil. This is utterly nihilistic — but Social Darwinism is our national faith, so this kind of thing is what our nation stands for! We call it the Wild West, or American values (e.g., God-given gun rights, "stand your ground", etc.). The civilized world, to which America has always refused to belong, calls it barbarism. Back in the 1920s, the general opinion of civilized Americans was that there is no such thing as "American civilization"; that phrase is, by definition, a contradiction in terms. America went directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization. Sure, there's pockets of civilization scattered around here and there, primarily in the more liberal big cities and college towns. But this massacre of innocent children in a small New England town is a reminder of America's true nature — i.e. no different from those other jihadis — and that barbarism will hunt civilized people down and slaughter them anywhere. Even worse: the killer was a local who went to that school and whose mother — his first victim — was a teacher! I don't ever expect anything to be done to help the mentally ill in America; after all, Social Darwinism is the national faith, and the victims are eugenically inferior because they died and the killer proved himself inferior by killing himself. I don't expect anybody in power to call for restoring the ban on civilian ownership of assault weapons, either; after all, the right to bear combat weaponry was given to Real Americans by GOD!!! and is too much a part of the national faith. This is the empire of capitalistic Christian Egoism, after all. Instead, I expect America to share the fate of its symbiotic enemy, the Soviet Union. The Cold War never ended; only one of its evil empires went away. It won't end until the other empire — ours — falls too. Need more proof that American conservatism and Corporatism have gone completely insane? Just wait till the terrorist insurrections begin — and they will, believe me. The Götterdämmerung of Conservative America is at hand. A disclaimer: I'm not even pretending to be an objective analyst in this post. The blood of twenty innocent children murdered by a psychopath won't let me. I need to vent my outrage before I punch out any of my conservative relatives, who aren't enemies. Now that it's out of my system, I can finally be objective: After several decades of devotion to drug prohibition, some American voters in Western states (including my own) have started to rebel against it. Will massacre after massacre of innocent civilians wake Americans up to the danger of guns in the hands of psychos, or to the dire need for the kind of mental-health system genuinely civilized countries consider an absolute necessity? How many American civilians have to die like their "enemy" Muslim counterparts before Americans start to wake up? My hope is that it won't take many more. But there's a class-war element to this, too. Note that the most conservative states dominated by the richest conservatives are the ones with the laxest gun (and even murder) laws and the highest murder rates. The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould bragged that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. He meant right-wing terrorism, championed in his day by the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of thing is exactly what he was talking about. Just wait till the real terrorism begins...

Obama's Neocon Turn Makes A Peace Movement Possible Again

The article: Is a Peace Movement Finally Awakening? by Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation

We know what the New Right is all about: corporate socialism. They call it Big Government Conservatism, and it consists of corporate welfare at home, imperial expansion abroad, and a national security state powered by religious fanaticism worthy of Al-Qaeda. The liberal Left, however, was all but defanged by the election of a black president who talked the liberal talk. But now we know that he walks the neocon walk. Liberals are actually starting to come out of their closets and protest again.

Guess what this means? Now that the Great Black Hope has proved to be just another tyrannical Great White Father, a left-wing peace movement has become possible once again. We antiwar libertarians are starting to believe we won't be so lonely for long.

Where liberals and libertarians part, of course, is in their opinion of government. Liberals, descending from the social democrats of the 19th and 20th centuries, believe that government can be used as a force for good, a weapon against the oppression of the masses. Libertarians are far more cynical: expansion of government welfare leads inevitably to the supreme corporate welfare of war and empire, or the other way around if the empire wants to buy the masses' loyalty. The supreme statement of the libertarian position comes from early 20th century libertarian Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the state."

But now Obama has shown his true colors. He is indeed bent on destroying America — but on behalf of his real owners: the banksters who lead the New Right and fund the TEA Party. He sold us a bill of goods, you see. The liberals are now a constituency without representation. Some of them are beginning to complain. As the war between the US and Wikileaks escalates, and as an increasingly frustrated US government threatens to abolish freedom of speech and unleash Soviet-style secret police tactics in order to defend the empire and its war policy, they may actually start to realize they may have to take to the streets again, perhaps all the way to the barricades.

But until then, antiwar libertarians and socialists will remain the proverbial prophets crying out in the wilderness...

No He Can't, Part 2: Obama Says War Is Peace, Jumps The Shark

The article: Nobel-winning Obama defends war in call for peace - Yahoo! News

So the latest chickenhawk warlord who rules the world, who might as well be called George Bush III because he loves loves LOVES war so much, the neocon in liberal's clothing called Barack Hussein Obama, accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in order to defend the negation of peace. He pays lip service to the peacemakers, then defends his true calling, All-Conquering Khan of the World, his true title. Apparently God's got him on Shrub Bush's hotline! "Some will kill; some will be killed." But what's important is that the killing must must MUST continue, at all costs! For the infinite glory and profit of America's corporate welfare kings!

Barack Hussein Obama, the smooth-talking Chicago conman who convinced us that he's a liberal but is really the second coming of Emperor Shrub, has now definitively jumped the shark. If you remember the 2008 US presidential election, Obama was elected by an antiwar majority. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going badly and bankrupting the country. But not only did the new president continue Bush's bailout of his big banker friends, he escalated both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is waiting like Bush for the perfect excuse to invade Iran in order to save damsel in distress Israel. He ended up being more of the same, only with the silver tongue of the Devil and a convincing liberal façade. The neocon warhawks are having multiple orgasms over their former seeming enemy's total conversion to the cause of empire.

Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.