Monday, September 03, 2018

Truest statement of the week

“John’s story is an American story,” Biden declared, “It’s the American story, grounded in respect and decency, basic fairness, the intolerance through the abuse of power. Many of you travel the world, look how the rest of the world looks at us. They look at us as a little naïve, so fair, so decent. We are the naïve Americans. That’s who we are. That’s who John was.”
What can one say about such absurdities? The American government and its military are despised the world over, responsible for inflicting death and destruction in countless countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and many more. This “so decent” government declares the right to kill anyone, invade any country, overthrow any government that gets in its way. The modus operandi of this “so fair” ruling class is that of bullying, threats and violence.

It is with the unbridled use of military force that McCain is most closely associated. He was among the most vociferous and earliest backers of the 2003 Iraq war, the Obama administration’s war against Libya and the CIA-backed operation in Syria. In support of the latter, he infamously traveled to Syria and met with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations spearheading the civil war. He was a strident advocate of aggression against Iran and an adamant opponent of any restriction on the gargantuan US military budget.

-- Joseph Kishore, "The canonization of John McCain: Media, political establishment turn warmonger into saint" (WSWS).






Truest statement of the week II

During his 32 years in the US Senate, the real John McCain was a consistent warmonger , advocating US military intervention in Africa, South America, Korea, and almost everywhere. He sang “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” before a veterans group, and called demonstrators against Henry Kissinger “despicable scum.” The record of his public calls for coups, invasions, blockades, bombings and assassinations to advance US military and economic domination of the planet is far too long to list.
All this explains why corporate media are lifting up their whitewashed and manufactured version of John McCain. He’s one of their own, a genuine war criminal and loyal servant of capital. Lifting him up, creating and embellishing his heroic story lifts up and legitimizes the rule of the rich. Now they’ll be looking for parks, schools and airports to name after him. Just as the elementary school in Aaron Magruder’s Boondocks was named after J. Edgar Hoover, we’ll soon see John McCain’s name staring back at us from what little public property is left. Get ready for it.

-- Bruce A. Dixon, "The Manufactured McCain: Lifting Up A Bloodstained, Lying, Venal Servant of Capitalist Empire" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).














A note to our readers

Hey --

 Monday.  And we're done. 

Let's thank all who participated this edition which includes Dallas and the following:




The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Trina of Trina's Kitchen, Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.


And what did we come up with?




Joseph Kishore gets another truest.
As does Bruce A. Dixon.
We were hoping to focus on the new government but as I (Jim) type, they still haven't formed a new government.  So we went with the bully that is the Israeli government.
Ava and C.I. take on JACK RYAN.
And this is the piece I begged them to write.  They worked forever on this -- mainly editing it down.  In its original form, this piece was four times as long.
I saw the headline at THE ATLANTIC on Saturday and knew I needed to comment.
Our continuing tracking of book coverage in the community.
Chase gets a truest.
Janet, damn it!
What we listened to while writing.


Now, if you'll excuse us, we're off to eat stir fry while enjoying a marathon of Hammer horror films.



Peace,





-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.





Editorial: The Iraq War just got worse





Yes, at last the multi-day horror story has come to an end.

But the point of it all was to celebrate and glorify war and this will continue.  New war on Iraq?  REUTERS claimed last week that Iran had moved missiles to Iraq.  Israel's stating that they have the right to bomb.

Grasp that.

They have the right to bomb because Iran supposedly moved missiles into Iraq.

On that dubious claim, the government of Israel insists that it has the right to bomb Iraq -- not Iran, mind you, Iraq.

The government of Israel is as addicted to war as the US government.  The two are partners in crime and the whole wide world exists at the end of their gun barrels.

Iraq which suffers through the 15th year of the latest war is now under threat from Israel.














TV: AMAZON peddles fear and hate

Abbie Cornish is good at playing Daddy's dumb little girl.  Is that it?  Watching AMAZON's new JACK RYAN series, we wondered what kind thing we could say about it?


3 JESS

We'd love to tell you that John Krasinski is worth watching but that would be a lie.  Abbie has to show her boobs, erect nipples and all, for a 'love' scene -- typical b.s., love is defined in the male world that is JACK RYAN via nudity -- but even taking a shower, Jack's butt is obscured by glass.

Jack Ryan?  Did the world ever need him?  The match stick hero of many a bad Tom Clancy book existed to remind everyone that Danielle Steele was more rooted in reality than Clancy.  Clancy's dead and so is his hero -- at least on the large screen.

After 9/11, Jack struggled on the big screen.  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, for example, became the first film of the series to fail to cross the $200 million mark.  JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT did even worse, failing to make it to $60 million domestically.

All we were saying was: give peace a chance and put this war porn in a cold locker.

But AMAZON's never been one to grasp reality -- they did, after all, air two seasons of HAND OF GOD.  And that explains how they ended up with JACK RYAN (no, even the PARAMOUNT NETWORK didn't want it).

John Krasinski walks around blandly throughout the entire eight episodes.  You're more likely to see one of his chest hairs blown out of place than any actual emotion cross his face.  To try to give him a regular guy appeal, they shoot a lot from his left side -- it's his left nostril that will make you squeamish.  He's not as chatty as he was in THE OFFICE but any 'conversation' is all recap so it probably doesn't matter.

Does it matter that he's wasting his best looking years on this garbage?

If he thinks it doesn't, he might want to take a look at Matt McCoy.  McCoy wasn't even old enough to be drafted for the Vietnam War but now the former WE GOT IT MADE lead is so old looking that he can convincly play a character who served in Vietnam with the President of the United States.  John, looks fade quickly.  Your acting chops aren't going to provide a long career, invest wisely.


For some reason, Daddy's girl Abbie Cornish falls for him.  She's self-abusing enough to endure looking like an idiot when this State Dept man she's sleeping with turns out to be CIA.  Striving for Daddy's love taught her to beg like a dog.


The only other woman of prominence is Hanin Ali played by Dina Shihabi.  Well, Dina tries to play the role.  It's less a character and more of bumper sticker.  Hanin is the good Arab -- yes, in eight episodes, the highly racist series does manage to feature one good Arab.  Hanin is a good Arab because she wants to go to Europe or to the US with her children.  She does not want to be part of the Arab world.  We're supposed to root for her for that reason.  We're supposed to root for her even more when she provides details to the US military that will lead to the deaths of Arabs.

We're never supposed to question the portrayals of Arabs or, in fact, why the hell this garbage is being made in 2018.

But we should question.

Are there no Arabs that work for the CIA?  For the US military?  Apparently, we're supposed to be thrilled by the 'diversity' that allows Wendell Pierce to play the sole American of color.


If there was a reason for AMAZON to make JACK RYAN it was to offer some solid gay erotica.  Instead, they've sold us more anti-Arab garbage that encourages us to fear and hate.  We'd say, "They ought to be ashamed," but we're sure that they are and jerking off as some man or woman beats them with a riding crop.










Burial of a Bitch (Ava and C.I.)

Forget Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the true Divine Feud was John McCain and Donald Trump, two men born into privilege who felt they were giants but achieved nothing to brag about.

Maybe their petty feuds weighed them down?

The War Party's biggest and ugliest bitch got buried after days of celebration.  The pathetic included Barbra Streisand who felt the need to Tweet about a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE skit filled with anger and hate -- watch it -- against her.  John McCain was the star of that skit and there was Barbra applauding him for it because he was dead and because she is an idiot.

Maybe it's not Barbra applauding him?  Who can tell with all those fillers?  You'd think she'd be grateful that all those decades of oily skin paid off with so few wrinkles but nothing could prevent her quest to look like Janice on THE MUPPETS.


Barbra was always a weakling, someone who did nothing political until the mid-80s because she landed on Tricky Dick's enemy list (he hated Jews).  But watching her praise John McCain was something until you remember she's an uneducated idiot and remains one to this day.  She made a joke of herself years ago with Mike Wallace and never got over it.  Instead of owning how stupid she looked on PM, she chose to blame Wallace.  So Mike she persecutes but blood-on-his-hands John McCain she celebrates?

That's what happens with poverty orphans who grow up uneducated and ugly.  They never learn to stand up for themselves.  They pretend they're strong but they are weak asses who accept the status quo and try desperately to be the status quo.  Which just explained Barbra's mediocre recording career, didn't it?

Yes, folks we come not to praise but to bury the bitch and all the bitches who created and applauded it.

That includes Meghan McCain.  We knew she was a big 'un but we were still shocked that she couldn't find something flattering to wear to her own father's funeral.  Did she really think a skin tight cat suit was the way to go with her girth on a hot summer day?

A JOHN MCCAIN

John McCain, for those who haven't guessed already, was a vile and disgusting man.  A wasteful man, in fact, who died a US senator.  CRAPAPEDIA tells you, "After a diagnosis of brain cancer in 2017, he reduced his role in the Senate to focus on treatment."


Oh, what a sweetie, right?



The US Senate is not a part time job.  He should have immediately resigned.  For his last eight months 'in' the Senate, he wasn't present and he didn't vote.

Being a US senator is not a part time job.

For those who say, "Unfair!"?  We slammed Ted Kennedy for choosing to die in office when he knew that would be the outcome.  One of the many reasons we are voting for Kevin de Leon over Dianne Feinstein is because Dianne is already the oldest person in the Senate and, if re-elected,  the 85-year-old will be 91 years old at the end of her term -- if she lives that long.

At 85, we don't trust her behind the wheel,  let alone in the US Senate.  The same was true of John McCain who died days before his 82nd birthday.

The US Constitution dictates that you have to be at least 30 to serve in the Senate.  Sadly, they don't have a retirement cap.

In 1790, the US carried out its first national census.  Though actual age was not a question, life expectancy was not 80-plus years.  Even now, it's not.  78 is the average life expectancy in the US.  We need a cap on this, an enforced retirement.


He shouldn't have run again in 2016 for age reasons alone.  Forget the brain cancer that would be diagnosed a year later.  He was too damn old to be in the US Senate.  At 85, the same is true of Dianne Feinstein.  Now the talk is who will replace him?

Replace him?

The Senate's only had 49 senators throughout 2018 and managed just fine, why replace him?  We believe Arizona has made the case that they only need one US senator.

No one ever needed John McCain.  He advocated for many things -- including teaching "intelligent" design in school.  No.  That's what churches are for.  If they want to teach that view, more power to them.  But we have separation of church and state.  It's something John didn't understand -- he also supported having students 'lead' prayers in school and at games and graduations because that's the kind of creepy, lying, twist everything kind of man he was.

These are never student 'led,' they are student exploited.

If you want religion in school, go to a religious school -- there are many great ones, they're are some solid ones and there are some lousy ones -- but they're all over the country if that's what you want.


Meghan opened her speech with a quote from Ernest Hemingway.  What?  You thought she'd open with MLK?


Never, because John McCain hated 'uppity Blacks' -- read that as any African-American who wouldn't take the back of the bus or act inferior.  This explains his opposition to a day honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By 2008, the US had finally matured enough to realize that they couldn't trash people of color.  They could still kill them -- especially if you had a badge, they could still discriminate against them -- they just couldn't flaunt their racism in public which explains McCain trying to rewrite his opposition to MLK as he ran his second failed presidential campaign.


Saturday, tubby Meghan was representing her father and the worst of White America as she carried the flag for racism.  "America has always been great!" she huffed, which may have been the first time the country ever heard a dog whistle from a dog.


Susan Glasser heard the whistle and repeated it.

Make no mistake: the applause ringing out at the Cathedral when Meghan McCain says 'America has no need to be made great again because America was always great' is not standard. Never heard applause at a funeral here before.







First off, Susan, it's mighty White of you (that's sarcasm) to explain to most Americans that you're not attending any funerals of people of color and that you somehow missed Aretha Franklin's funeral on Friday.  (There was applause at Aretha's funeral.)

Second, lose the little drawing on Twitter.  You're facing down fifty and look sixty.  You're aware that people keep saying, "Look at that good boy, Peter Baker, taking his grandma out to dinner."  Or for those who don't recognize your husband, "Look at the nice gay man, taking his elderly grandma out to dinner."

Third, American's not always been great despite your lies and the lies of other White racists including Meghan McCain.

America wasn't great with slavery.  It wasn't great with illegal wars (Vietnam and Iraq, to name two).  It wasn't great with its treatement of people of color or people who are challenged or disabled.  It wasn't great to women.


Here's racist Susan Glasser celebrating Saturday's White Power rally:


  1. Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney next to each other at John McCain’s funeral... seems so much how Washington used to be, and is no longer. When America hears these stirring patriotic songs today, do they even hear the same words?
  2. Donald Trump's name has not been used once at the Washington National Cathedral today. It does not have to be. An extraordinary rebuke of the current president by his predecessors, a civics lesson in a kind of American politics that may be gone but at least will be well mourned
  3. Even Kissinger!







A civic lesson?

From War Criminal Henry Kissinger and War Hawks Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney?

Oh, Susan, your racism, your entitlement, it all needs to leave this earth.

No one will mourn your pasty absence.

It takes a special kind of neocon trash -- and Susan Glasser is it -- to celebrate this nonsense.

But that's what the US corporate media runs on -- White power.  It exists to celebrate empire and to attack the people.   Which is how Henry Kissinger shows up and doesn't get called out.  The media's made a big deal out of Louis Farrakhan attending Aretha's funeral but it's somehow acceptable for War Criminal Henry Kissinger to speak at John McCain's funeral?


Here's Zack Beauchamp (VOX) in 2016:

Here is the problem with this account of Kissinger: It ignores the fact that he shares responsibility for the deaths of enormous numbers of innocent people. For those who believe American policy should be about more than the naked pursuit of self-interest, the continuing veneration of Kissinger in Washington is appalling.
Most infamously, Kissinger masterminded a Nixon-era plan to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Nominally, the bombing — which indiscriminately hit targets in civilian-populated areas — was supposed to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases. In reality, it was designed to improve America's strategic position before a negotiated withdrawal.
During the first stage of the bombing, from 1969 to 1970, Kissinger personally approved all 3,875 bombing raids, according to a contemporary Pentagon report.
"The degree of micro-management revealed in Kissinger's memoirs forbids the idea that anything of importance took place without his knowledge of permission," the late Christopher Hitchens wrote in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. "Of nothing is this more true than his own individual involvement in the bombing ... of neutral Cambodia."

American bombs killed between 150,000 and 500,000 people in Cambodia. That created a swell of public support for Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge rebels, who exploited popular anger at the bombings to seize control of the government in 1975. The Khmer Rouge then slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and starved even more, ultimately killing at least a million people, about one-seventh of the country's population.
In 1971, Pakistani dictator Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan began slaughtering the residents of East Pakistan (what's now Bangladesh) in retaliation for electing a leader who demanded autonomy. Instead of intervening to stop Yahya, Kissinger sent him weapons — a policy that was, at the time, illegal under US law.
He pulled the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, from his post for questioning the policy, and blocked efforts to pressure Pakistan (a US ally) to end its slaughter. The killing only stopped after India intervened to stop it; estimates of the death toll range from 300,000 to 3 million.

"Kissinger joked about the massacre of Bengali Hindus, and, his voice dripping with contempt, sneered at Americans who 'bleed' for 'the dying Bengalis," Princeton professor Gary Bass writes in a Politico Magazine piece. Bass suggests that Kissinger's policy was meant to maintain the alliance with Pakistan, which was an anti-communist bulwark in the region.
We're still learning about the full extent of Kissinger's responsibility for violence around the world.
In 2014, newly declassified documents suggested that in the 1970s, Kissinger signaled to Argentina's right-wing military leaders that the US would not object to its plans to launch a 1976 crackdown on dissent that became known as the Dirty War — which killed about 30,000 people.
The documents released in 2014 include an account, from then-US Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill, of Kissinger's conversation with Argentine Foreign Minister César Augusto Guzzetti. Guzzetti, it seems, was afraid the crackdown would bring down pressure from the US on human rights — but Kissinger told him that no such pressure would come:
The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.
In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.
This is not an exhaustive list of Kissinger's crimes: It doesn't touch, among other things, his support for proxy wars in sub-Saharan Africa or his backing of the Indonesian dictator Suharto's killings in East Timor.

"A back-of-the-envelope count would attribute three, maybe four million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims," Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, writes at the Nation.


That's the man who induced Susan Glasser's Twitter orgasm.

That THE NEW YORKER even publishes Susan Glasser goes to what a cess pool the rag's become under David Remnick who supported the Iraq War.

Saturday was awful with just about every TV channel except for COZI airing live coverage of the b.s. COZI instead went with an episode of MCMILLAN & WIFE, "Freefall to Terror," guest starring the always groovy Barbara Feldon.

There was nothing groovy about the celebration of John McCain.

There was also nothing groovy about the fact that the celebration lasted days.

Thursday, was bad enough what with Joe Biden stepping out of the closet to announce, "My name is Joe Biden.  I'm a Democrat.  And I love John McCain."

All that embarrassment did was remind everyone that Joe and John both sang the praises of hate merchant and segrationist Strom Thurmond when he died.

Yeah, it wasn't that long ago.  Not even twenty years, in fact.

A time when White America could get away with celebrating the Dixiecrat Thurmond -- a vile and hateful man.  A time that the Susan Glassers in the media miss so badly.

Joe Biden's demonstrated poor judgment before but this go round may be just enough to make sure he doesn't get the Democratic Party nomination in 2020 because his embrace of racism -- which is all John McCain ever war -- will no doubt remind people of his attacks on law professor Anita Hill as well as his comments about Barack Obama in 2007 -- comments that sounded to so many like the comments of a racist.

From Xuan Thai and Ted Barrett's 2007 CNN report:

 "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." (Watch Biden's comments and Obama's reaction Video)
Biden issued a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying: "I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone. That was not my intent and I expressed that to Sen. Obama."
[. . .]
Later on Wednesday, Obama, in a written statement, said "I didn't take Sen. Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate." 


Was it worth it, Joe, giving up your dreams of a 2020 nomination to celebrate the freak show that was John McCain?

Joe, like so many, was desperate to be included in the celebration, desperate to fit in.  It's these moments that had your parents asking you, "If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you?"

See, what your parents were trying to instill in you was the need to stand up for what was right, to not blindly go along in things like celebrating a man responsible for so many dead.  Barbra Streisand didn't have a parent to teach her that lesson which is why her life, like her recordings, remains so unimportant and so pedestrian.  A voice that once amazed (the sixties) went on to accomplish nothing.  It was more important to her to 'fit in' than to achieve anything.  So she applauds John McCain and pretends he was good just like she spent the bulk of her recording career pretending to be somebody else.

Self-hatred, it's at the root of a lot of racism.

Racism is what fuels empires, after all.  And wars are the way racism manifests itself collectively.

"I hated my enemies even before they held me captive because hate sustained me in my devotion to their complete destruction and helped me overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what had to be done by my hand," spat the 'great' John McCain (Richard Falk, "The Vietnam Syndrome," THE NATION, July 9, 2001).


Wars.


Strange how Big Gal Meg and her hideous speech devoted so little time to war.

He "was defined by love" -- declared Meggy -- forgetting that he showed no love when bombing Vietnam.  He showed no love.  He did what he was ordered to do.  No question.

But he never showed love.

Not in his final years when he referred to the Vietnamese as "g**ks" (no, not just his captors, he referred to all Vietnames by that term).

Never.

He is responsible for the deaths of so many Vietnamese -- that toll includes children.  A large number of children.

But Susan Glasser and the other White Power racists don't care about that because, if your skin is not White, you really don't matter in their world.

That's the world that's mourning John McCain.

Sam Husseini (COUNTERPUNCH) observes:


Of course, the greatest discrepancy, rarely hinted at, is how humanized someone like McCain is and how rarely victims of the wars he pushed are. Does the average American know the name of a single civilian Vietnamese or Iraqi victim of the U.S. military?
But we have reams of selective information about McCain, endlessly depicted, like clichés of Confederate commanders, as a great war hero, full of nobility and honor.
But unlike Confederates who faced a Union army on a level playing field, he dropped bombs from thousands of feet in the air on an impoverished country struggling for its own independence. The U.S. establishment virtually invented the South in Vietnam, backing a war that could seem like a civil war — with the effect of bleeding the nation.

Pushing aggressive wars, some portrayed as civil wars, would be a pattern McCain would back as a congressman and senator in the coming decades: Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen — country after country ripped apart, all with predictable carnage.


It's a basic truth.



A politician's legacy is a political not personal question. An enthusiastic supporter of every imperialist war while in office, John McCain shares responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths. To whitewash that is to disrespect those who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere




Corporate whores -- and convicted pedophile Scott Ritter using TRUTH DIG as his cum rag -- couldn't even get the non-basics about Vietnam correct.  Did you know, for example, that John McCain deserved praise for not taking Vietnam up on an offer to leave and return to America?

Well, golly, what we know is that John McCain was in the US military and McCain didn't have the individual ability to leave, he had to get permission from the commanding officer of the POWs and that the rules barred him from taking such an offer regardless.

His whole life is a lie.  Meghan and others claiming that torture is why he couldn't lift an arm?  He was tortured, yes.  But he hurt his own arm and he did that because he never followed orders and he never did what he was trained to do.  He injured himself -- including the wound Meghan spoke of -- because he ejected improperly.  He's lucky the Vietnamese rescued him or he would have drowned.

Again, he was tortured, we're not denying that.  We're also not condemning him for his propaganda videos and statements he made as a POW for the North Vietnamese.

But all of that has to be stripped away to portray him as a hero.

Reality: When you strip away the dead he killed, when you strip away the fact that he hurt himself, when you strip away his actions as a POW, there's really not much left, is there?


That's the real story of John McCain -- a wasted life.



The never-ending he's-still-dead coverage never found time to note the victims or to note that John McCain learned nothing in his life.  Vietnam was never a threat to the US.  The domino theory is only more laughable with each passing year.  But these lies -- and racism -- sold war on Vietnam.  Similar lies sold the Iraq War.  Saddam Hussein, John McCain publicly insisted, was on the verge of nuclear weapons.  An appearance on David Letterman's CBS talk show a month after 9/11 was where he falsely linked Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks.


Were that his only 'contribution,' that would be bad enough.  But there's so much more.

In 2008, Mark G. Levey (SCOOP) noted other contributions:



Here are some key events to keep in mind as the Iraq War deception unfolds:

  • 1998-2003 - John McCain enthusiastically espoused the delusion about cheap and easy Middle East wars, and sponsored Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.) organization, even though the CIA had cut it off for producing faulty intelligence.

  • 1998 - McCain was a co-sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act that led to the creation of a false intelligence factory that replaced CIA Iraq reporting. He led charges in the Senate about Iraqi WMD programs that U.S. intelligence was reporting didn’t exist.

  • 2001-2003 - Using $100 million allocated by the Act cosponsored by McCain, Ahmed Chalabi’s I.N.C. generated the false intelligence about nonexistent mobile bioweapons labs cited as part of the case for the Iraq invasion. I.N.C. Chalabi’s group was paid $335,000 a month in the lead-up to the Iraq war to gather intelligence.

  • 2003 - McCain and four other Republican Senators made an appeal to Bush to “personally clear the bureaucratic roadblocks within the State Department” that stood in the way of even more funding for the I.N.C. McCain acted as a character witness for Chalabi, stating “He’s a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart.”

  • Prior to advocating in favor of the October, 2002 Iraq War Resolution, McCain read the classified CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and was briefed on multiple occasions about it. While he knew that U.S. intelligence was split over Iraq WMDs, McCain never said anything publicly about the other view contained in the classified documents in which he had been given special access.

  • 05/03 – present - Even after the Iraq WMD deception and failed occupation became clear, McCain has refused to acknowledge that he had been wrong all along about the justifications for the Iraq War, and says he would vote again for that war, and again vote to fund Chalabi.

  • Senator McCain still avoids taking responsibility for his role in the Iraq intelligence failure, perhaps for no better reason than he kept some distance between himself and operatives at the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President who actually carried out the policy, some of whom were later convicted of espionage and related charges.

  • 1997-present - The McCain campaign’s chief publicist, Charlie Black, a powerful GOP lobbyist, has protected and promoted the cause of Ahmad Chalabi’s I.N.C. organization in Washington since 1997, and also played a major role in spreading I.N.C. disinformation.

  • 1997-present – As the Iraq War plan developed, Black’s lobbying firm has received hundreds of millions from U.S. companies doing Iraq War related business, a substantial portion of the profits from which Black has funneled back to McCain and other prominent GOP leaders





John McCain, in May of 2018, copped to the Iraq War being a "mistake."

Crime.  It was a crime.  It was a crime and it is ongoing.  The Iraqi people continue to die, their country has been destroyed and US troops continue to die.



In fact, John McCain's final Tweet was noting the latest US service member killed in the ongoing war.


Cindy and I send our prayers to the family and friends of Chief Warrant Officer 3 Taylor J. Galvin who was killed in a helicopter crash in .




In the Tweet, 'brave' McCain offers "prayers."  He does not take accountability for his actions.  He never did.


You wouldn't know that to hear the media or Meghan go on and on and on.

Meghan insisted America was always great and if, like Meghan, you believe only White males matter, then maybe it was?

But if you grasp that there's a whole world missing in the media coverage and in Meghan's stupid, yammering speech, you realize you've been sitting through one lie after another.

Meghan, for example, went on and on about how John would be meeting his father and his grandfather in heaven.  She never noted the plantation -- the family plantation -- or the slaves.  Yeah, it's not so heroic in the McCain family.  She had to vanish the family history of slave ownership in order to portray John as heroic.  But here's the other thing, heroic people really don't need to be called heroic over and over.  Real heroic people just need to have their actual deeds noted.



"He's dead and that's good.  Good riddance.  I don't see why we should grieve or have any sadness or melancholy over his passing.  It's good riddance," activist Dhoruba Bin Wahad  declared last week on HARD KNOCK RADIO.    A target of COINTELPRO, Dhoruba survived attacks from his own government, the government that was supposed to represent him.  Taking them on, he was released from prison and won settlements from the FBI and the city of New York.  That's heroic.  Last April, Kilu Nyasha died.  She spent her life fighting for the truth.  That's heroic.


John McCain was a bully, not a hero.


Meghan shared that her father told her to be "tough."  Of course, he did.  A clenched fist is all he ever offered, never an open heart or open arms.  Unintentionally, Meghan made that very clear in her long speech.

She also made it clear that's she is as much a bitch as her thankfully dead father.

She and other groupies are on Bitch John's side and trashing Bitch Donald for not showing proper fandom for her dead father.

Why would he?

Yes, Donald's a bitch.  He's always been that and probably always will be.

But the reality is that John McCain was outright rude to Donald Trump when John was alive. The reality is that John McCain designed his funeral as a middle finger to Donald Trump.  There's no reason that Donald Trump has to go along with that or that he has to pretend.

In fact, there's more honesty in Donald Trump's open disdain for McCain than there was in Johnb McCain's entire life.

Two bitches engaged in a final cat fight.  America could have stood back and just enjoyed the fireworks.  Instead, a bunch of idiots wanted to choose sides -- goaded by the media and War Hawks.

A bitch got buried -- finally.  And that's not a sad thing.  Goodbye and good riddance.