Aides Stunned, Panicked Wall Street Calls For "Returning" President to Indonesia
Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
May 19, 2011 6:47 a.m. EDT
(LNB) -- Following emergency surgery to correct faltering mental capacities, president Barack Obama is "finally talking sense," according to a team of neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins.
"It may be hard to believe, but he's really lucid and rational" said his chief neurosurgeon, Dr. Ding Dong, who performed the 7 1/2 hour-operation to replace the part of Obama's skull that had rotted away from years of exposure to neo-liberal ideology. "He woke up from surgery and said new nuclear plant construction didn't make sense in the midst of a Chernobyl-like meltdown in Japan."
The president told reporters that he was "very grateful" to have a working brain, which his doctors predicted would "almost certainly" help him overcome an apparently self-inflicted lobotomy that had rendered him incapable of rational thought while the nation he was entrusted to govern careened from one national disaster to another over the past two plus years.
"The brain is in good position, the president is thinking critically, and everything looks great," said Dr. Dong. "We expect the nation's business to be on a rational footing in a very short time," he added.
These remarks provoked panic on Wall Street, with major investment houses calling for the president to be "returned" to Indonesia. "The last thing we need is a president who can rationally order the nation's priorities in accordance with the Constitution's call to promote the general welfare," said Bernie Rosenthal of Neurosis Production Unlimited, a trillion dollar a year marketing firm. "The effort to bring this treasonous project to fruition is the clearest possible proof that Barack Obama is not an American citizen and therefore not really president," he added.
Aides initially attributed the president's uncharacteristic rationality to the lingering effects of a new anesthesia, but when Obama continued to exhibit incisive common sense throughout the day, they were alerted to the surgery's complete success. Over lunch the president said that Israel's policy of locking the Palestinian people in a giant outdoor prison would "hardly have won the approval of Dr. King." Later, he proclaimed it "nonsensical" to give trillions of dollars worth of aid to swindling investment firms while Main Street "languished in economic disaster."
The president ruined his original brain reading stacks of position papers written by corporate PR flacks and "Israel forever" fanatics. As he gradually lost the power to reason, he gave away the store to plundering corporations and dispatched U.S. military forces to carry out pointless slaughters in one country after another.
Like patients with gunshot wounds to the head, Obama ended up with an extreme inability to reason. Before replacing his brain, his neurosurgical team cut a hole in his head to relieve the pressure caused by the enormous buildup of stale rhetoric inside his softened skull. Dr. Dong said an internal drain, called a shunt, was inserted into Obama's cranial cavity to carry excess verbiage from the brain to the abdominal cavity, where it can now be disposed of by normal elimination processes. Dr. Dong called the procedure an "intellectual laxative."
------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Stale Bread, Brutal Circus
With the western imperial system in grave condition its population needs constant mind game manipulation to help ruling minorities maintain control. Recent Bread and Circus spectacles have featured a marriage of royal entities from an alleged democratic nation, and a hit squad performing a mafia job and depicted as heroic for their work. This served to briefly occupy the minds of people who should be considering far more serious matters.
A marriage continuing a tradition of socially acceptable incestuous families brought some temporary escapist entertainment to souls otherwise dealing with work, rent, or unemployment. Despite the rarely mentioned contradiction of genetic royalty in a system of democratic equality, the lovely bride and less lovely groom were hailed and farewelled and will probably not be heard from again until a divorce or other scandal. But the hit job on a famously created demon will have repercussions and though useful as a propaganda tool for those in power, questions have been raised which will hopefully lead to more exposure of material reality by “ the American street" .
Without arrest, trial or even its pretense, the alleged mastermind of the 911 terror attack was, we are told, killed at a hideaway where he had evaded military un-intelligence for ten years. The ineptitude that allowed the 911 disasters to happen was further exemplified in the sloppy work of murdering the supposed arch-villain mastermind, and its breathless uncritical reportage followed by macho posturing of government officials of all races, creeds and sexes. We should not be surprised at the legal injustice since the president, a supposed constitutional expert, previously revealed his Bush-level ignorance in pronouncing Bradley Manning guilty without trial, so why not the foreign monster? Media in its dutiful role as stenographer and cheerleader for power had long depicted Osama as the archfiend who directed the 911 attacks, despite no evidence other than his publicly expressed hatred for those brutalizing his people. How could citizens exposed to constant manufactured fictional news be expected to question the killing of this villain? And yet many among them did just that, proving that Abraham Lincoln - who, like another alleged archfiend, Gaddafi, “killed his own people” - was correct: Americans may be ignorant, but we are not stupid. Of course that excludes our leaders, who are maintained in their stupidity only by our controlled ignorance.
The storied bravery of a hit squad encountering a madman using a woman as a shield and firing at will soon revealed that Osama wasn’t armed at all. The only resistance encountered was from his unarmed wife, who was bravely shot by the assaulting mob. While a performance of gruesome public joy was arranged, we learned that the corpse was buried at sea, and no photos would be revealed to the public. This will invite more skeptics to believe that Osama was already dead, had never been alive in the first place, or was a secret triple agent of the Mossad – CIA -3 Stooges conspiracy. But whatever level of informed or surreal belief is entertained by skeptics, the crime was clear to anyone able to pierce the plastic curtain of disinformation that turned a serious situation with implications of further terrorist threat into a grotesque glorification of murder and vengeance for a crime with which Osama likely had little if any direct involvement.
The Islamic fundamentalists at the core of 911 terror may be a tiny minority, but whether manipulated or not they represent a growing majority of the global population that is saying, one way or another: enough is enough, we refuse to live under your boot heels any longer and we demand control of our own lives.
The murderous assault on another media created villain in Libya was momentarily placed on the back pages while new legends, fables and outright lies were being presented as news of the world. A nation which once had the highest material quality of life on the African continent is being reduced to a bombed and bleeding victim of western aggression, while the conservative right and the liberal left in America join in bipartisan patriotic applause at this humanitarian justice. If genetic royalty is part of democracy, why cant mass murder be an expression of peace?
What has been romanticized as an Arab Spring may only be a seasonal hint with real democracy still on the horizon, but it is unmistakable as a trend. With growing solidarity among Palestinians and their global supporters, the western imperial response to signs that Usrael domination is nearing its end has led to feverish actions in nations where regimes which may have legitimate opposition have been transformed, especially in Libya, into bloody civil wars by euro-western manipulation and intervention. But the Arab tyrants who suck up to the west, sit on billions of dollars and rule their subjects with an iron hand, are allowed to subdue their roused populations with violence unquestioned by this “democracy” and its fellow travelers who call themselves liberals or progressives.
There may be short-term success for the military power of the empire, but in the long term its political economic contradictions will come crashing down. The profit and loss financial domination of the world by private capital, far more deadly than any royal family or individual dictatorship, is ultimately making it impossible for the continuity of the human race and its foundation: mother earth. More distractions via bread and circus spectacles should not and cannot impede the work of humanity to bring about another world, which is not only possible but absolutely necessary.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Imperial Brain Damage: The Week in Review
by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
The political assassination of Osama Bin Laden predictably triggered an orgy of media imbecility among U.S. pundits. The hit by heavily-armed Navy SEALS in the dead of night at a Pakistani military compound in Abbottabad was routinely described as "daring," though only a lone courier appears to have fought back, which makes it difficult to see much courage at work. But trust the U.S. media to praise to the skies any U.S. military effort to kill for an allegedly greater good (always), no matter whose national sovereignty is violated, how many innocent bystanders are killed, or how little legal or moral authority for the act is presented. "Justice has been done," intoned a clueless President Obama, who has attacked six countries in just over two years in office, without a shred of convincing legal or moral justification for any of the interventions. (The six countries are: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia.)
The Philadelphia Inquirer waxed psychoanalytic, saying that Americans could at last overcome the sense of pessimism and failure they "felt - but rarely acknowledged - in not being able to apprehend bin Laden for so long." Our country continues to face "huge challenges" in Afghanistan and Iraq, the editors went on, but with Bin Laden dead "it's easier to envision a day not too long from now when the wars are over, the troops come home, and optimism reigns."
It's difficult to know where to start with this. No sane person could possibly anticipate that the endless series of U.S. sponsored wars dating back to the colonial era are about to come to an end. As noted, Obama has attacked six countries in barely half a term of office, a rate that, if sustained, would yield 20 or more interventions should Obama last eight years in the White House.
Incidentally, the "huge challenges" we face in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently do not include presenting a credible reason for being in those countries in the first place. The Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over to U.S. authorities after 911, but Washington turned them down. And most of the world is very well aware by now that the Iraq war was launched without even the pretense of a justification.
As for why it would be good for "optimism" to reign over the U.S.A., where twenty-five million people are out of work, a quarter of American mortgages are under water, a third of the American people are without savings to fall back on, and where there continues to be no sign of economic recovery three years into the Great Recession, the Inquirer's editors unfortunately do not indicate. Suffice it so say that the conclusion is something less than self-evident.
Meanwhile the Kansas City Star editorialized that America's resolve to pursue our enemies to the ends of the earth sends them an important message, to wit: "If you do what bin Laden did, the United States will find you no matter where you hide, no matter how long it takes." Apparently, the Star's editors have forgotten that Muslim terrorists of the Bin Laden variety do not fear death, and actually welcome martyrdom, which makes intimidation a poor strategy. Unfortunately, the U.S. media have the attention span of a two-year old, and regularly forget what it is most important to remember.
Shannen Coffin in NationalReview.com said that Bin Laden was tracked down partly because of U.S. torture policy. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003, "he was resistant to any form of interrogation, conventional or otherwise." But waterboarding and "other enhanced measures" made him more "compliant," and interrogators were able to deduce from his responses clues about the whereabouts of Bin Laden's courier.
Oh, happy day! Torture works after all. The fact that Bin Laden's death does nothing to make anyone safer, and in fact, has U.S. authorities redoubling their efforts to prevent expected terrorist revenge attacks, is beneath our contempt to notice. We're celebrating, after all, and we want no more of "pessimism" pointing out the cost of our suicidal recklessness.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post weighed in with the judgment that for too long Obama has displayed a "counterproductive sensitivity for the sensitivities of the Muslim world," by deferring to U.N. approval (When? Where?). But by sending in a commando team to assassinate bin Laden, "whether or not Pakistan or anyone else liked it," Obama has broken free of the wimp factor.
In point of fact Obama has shown utter contempt for Muslims in Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His sending in an assassination squad to kill Bin Laden is simply more of the same. There is nothing "manly" in this, and U.S. punditry's cheerleading for militarist machismo is a deadly plague leading the world to incalculable destruction. Only a juvenile delinquent could see anything to be happy about here.
Louis Klarevas in NewRepublic.com at least got a point half right: "Decapitating al Qaida will not stop those who feel it is their duty to strike against the U.S. and its assets in the name of bin Laden's twisted version of Islam." Right. The issue is not Bin Laden, but the adherents of his and similar ideologies, who can be counted on to strike back for this latest attack, killing yet more innocents. ["Terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge him," said CIA Director Leon Panetta.] Why should more Americans die for Israel and U.S. Empire? And why should we be happy about a foreign policy that invites those deaths?
In any event, it is an open question as to how "twisted" Bin Laden's version of Islam is. Is it more "twisted" than Obama's Zionism, now laying waste to what remains of historic Palestine? Or more twisted than his Christianity (sorry for the repetition), which somehow allows his conscience to rest easy as he sets records for pilotless drone attacks, a particularly cowardly form of "warfare"? One very much doubts it. As usual, U.S. hypocrisy is boundless.
David Barno in the New York Times said that Bin Laden's killing reminds his followers that the U.S. is "a power to be reckoned with," which they were apparently unaware of when the U.S. was merely reducing one Muslim-dominant country after another to rubble. It is apparently inconceivable to the pundit class that a limitless willingness to kill does not make the U.S. respected in the world. Quite the contrary.
Juliette Kayyem in the Boston Globe commented that our government's formerly "excited" posture vis-a-vis terrorism has transformed itself into "resolute calmness" (an improvement?). The new watchword is, "Secretly kill. Publicly chill." Uncharacteristically, the Department of Homeland Security didn't even issue a new alert this week, since no new specifics about future attacks were uncovered to "warrant freaking everyone out." This is supposedly evidence that we're now better at coping with the "nature of the world we live in."
Secretly kill, publicly chill? Is this woman serious? Such comments bespeak a level of dissociation from reality that should make Ms. Kayyem certifiable. And we're better at coping with reality in the wake of killing Bin Laden? While the newspapers shriek that we "got our man" and citizen mobs besiege the White House with vulgar chants of "USA! USA! USA!"
If this is sanity, what is madness?
Source:
Quoted material from "The Week, "May 13, 2011
-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
The political assassination of Osama Bin Laden predictably triggered an orgy of media imbecility among U.S. pundits. The hit by heavily-armed Navy SEALS in the dead of night at a Pakistani military compound in Abbottabad was routinely described as "daring," though only a lone courier appears to have fought back, which makes it difficult to see much courage at work. But trust the U.S. media to praise to the skies any U.S. military effort to kill for an allegedly greater good (always), no matter whose national sovereignty is violated, how many innocent bystanders are killed, or how little legal or moral authority for the act is presented. "Justice has been done," intoned a clueless President Obama, who has attacked six countries in just over two years in office, without a shred of convincing legal or moral justification for any of the interventions. (The six countries are: Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia.)
The Philadelphia Inquirer waxed psychoanalytic, saying that Americans could at last overcome the sense of pessimism and failure they "felt - but rarely acknowledged - in not being able to apprehend bin Laden for so long." Our country continues to face "huge challenges" in Afghanistan and Iraq, the editors went on, but with Bin Laden dead "it's easier to envision a day not too long from now when the wars are over, the troops come home, and optimism reigns."
It's difficult to know where to start with this. No sane person could possibly anticipate that the endless series of U.S. sponsored wars dating back to the colonial era are about to come to an end. As noted, Obama has attacked six countries in barely half a term of office, a rate that, if sustained, would yield 20 or more interventions should Obama last eight years in the White House.
Incidentally, the "huge challenges" we face in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently do not include presenting a credible reason for being in those countries in the first place. The Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over to U.S. authorities after 911, but Washington turned them down. And most of the world is very well aware by now that the Iraq war was launched without even the pretense of a justification.
As for why it would be good for "optimism" to reign over the U.S.A., where twenty-five million people are out of work, a quarter of American mortgages are under water, a third of the American people are without savings to fall back on, and where there continues to be no sign of economic recovery three years into the Great Recession, the Inquirer's editors unfortunately do not indicate. Suffice it so say that the conclusion is something less than self-evident.
Meanwhile the Kansas City Star editorialized that America's resolve to pursue our enemies to the ends of the earth sends them an important message, to wit: "If you do what bin Laden did, the United States will find you no matter where you hide, no matter how long it takes." Apparently, the Star's editors have forgotten that Muslim terrorists of the Bin Laden variety do not fear death, and actually welcome martyrdom, which makes intimidation a poor strategy. Unfortunately, the U.S. media have the attention span of a two-year old, and regularly forget what it is most important to remember.
Shannen Coffin in NationalReview.com said that Bin Laden was tracked down partly because of U.S. torture policy. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in 2003, "he was resistant to any form of interrogation, conventional or otherwise." But waterboarding and "other enhanced measures" made him more "compliant," and interrogators were able to deduce from his responses clues about the whereabouts of Bin Laden's courier.
Oh, happy day! Torture works after all. The fact that Bin Laden's death does nothing to make anyone safer, and in fact, has U.S. authorities redoubling their efforts to prevent expected terrorist revenge attacks, is beneath our contempt to notice. We're celebrating, after all, and we want no more of "pessimism" pointing out the cost of our suicidal recklessness.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post weighed in with the judgment that for too long Obama has displayed a "counterproductive sensitivity for the sensitivities of the Muslim world," by deferring to U.N. approval (When? Where?). But by sending in a commando team to assassinate bin Laden, "whether or not Pakistan or anyone else liked it," Obama has broken free of the wimp factor.
In point of fact Obama has shown utter contempt for Muslims in Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His sending in an assassination squad to kill Bin Laden is simply more of the same. There is nothing "manly" in this, and U.S. punditry's cheerleading for militarist machismo is a deadly plague leading the world to incalculable destruction. Only a juvenile delinquent could see anything to be happy about here.
Louis Klarevas in NewRepublic.com at least got a point half right: "Decapitating al Qaida will not stop those who feel it is their duty to strike against the U.S. and its assets in the name of bin Laden's twisted version of Islam." Right. The issue is not Bin Laden, but the adherents of his and similar ideologies, who can be counted on to strike back for this latest attack, killing yet more innocents. ["Terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge him," said CIA Director Leon Panetta.] Why should more Americans die for Israel and U.S. Empire? And why should we be happy about a foreign policy that invites those deaths?
In any event, it is an open question as to how "twisted" Bin Laden's version of Islam is. Is it more "twisted" than Obama's Zionism, now laying waste to what remains of historic Palestine? Or more twisted than his Christianity (sorry for the repetition), which somehow allows his conscience to rest easy as he sets records for pilotless drone attacks, a particularly cowardly form of "warfare"? One very much doubts it. As usual, U.S. hypocrisy is boundless.
David Barno in the New York Times said that Bin Laden's killing reminds his followers that the U.S. is "a power to be reckoned with," which they were apparently unaware of when the U.S. was merely reducing one Muslim-dominant country after another to rubble. It is apparently inconceivable to the pundit class that a limitless willingness to kill does not make the U.S. respected in the world. Quite the contrary.
Juliette Kayyem in the Boston Globe commented that our government's formerly "excited" posture vis-a-vis terrorism has transformed itself into "resolute calmness" (an improvement?). The new watchword is, "Secretly kill. Publicly chill." Uncharacteristically, the Department of Homeland Security didn't even issue a new alert this week, since no new specifics about future attacks were uncovered to "warrant freaking everyone out." This is supposedly evidence that we're now better at coping with the "nature of the world we live in."
Secretly kill, publicly chill? Is this woman serious? Such comments bespeak a level of dissociation from reality that should make Ms. Kayyem certifiable. And we're better at coping with reality in the wake of killing Bin Laden? While the newspapers shriek that we "got our man" and citizen mobs besiege the White House with vulgar chants of "USA! USA! USA!"
If this is sanity, what is madness?
Source:
Quoted material from "The Week, "May 13, 2011
-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com