Tuesday, July 28, 2009

America's SS brigades return home to maim, rape and murder

If you get raped and/or killed in the next 10 or 20 years, there's a decent chance it'll be by one of our fucked up Middle East "heroes." Having been trained, paid and encouraged to kill and torture overseas, there should be no surprise that the pattern has continued at home... and we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

I don't want to hear any shit about about my lack of patriotism in writing this piece. This is reality and you need to deal with it, we all do. My father came back violent, fucked up and drugged up from two tours in Vietnam and we have the same total lack of preparedness to deal with this now that we did in the 1970s and '80s. As for me, I avoided the military like the plague it is, but did serve this country as a State Department peace officer in Bosnia. That's just an advance "shut the fuck up" for any dimwitted commenters who are always happy to see other people stick their necks out for your military boners. My family and I contributed too much to this "USA #1" shit already.

Assholes like Bush and Obama never would be in harm's way, ducking military service one way or the other; they just get to play with little plastic soldiers on the map in the situation room and get to feel like big, big men. It was obvious from Day One of the Obama campiagn that he was as committed to keeping the killing going in the region as was Bush, one of the many reasons I did the rational thing and voted, once again, for Mr. Nader.

Honestly, how does this sound at all different from what the SS did in Eastern Europe in the '40s? One of many inevitable articles that eventually leak out with the horrible truth of the killing fields.


""Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,"
said Daniel Freeman. "You came too close, we lit you up. You didn't stop, we ran
your car over with the Bradley," an armored fighting vehicle.


With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions "and just light the whole area up," said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. "If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked 'em."

Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.


"You didn't get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong," he said. ... Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General's Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason. Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man's body to his Humvee and drove around the
neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims' brains."


Mission accomplished! Note that Obama has deployed this same Iraq-bound brigade described above to Afghanistan, where a different set of people can now be brutally murdered, maimed, tortured and sometimes raped for no fucking reason at all, blowing the money that we could have spent here on health care and schools in the process... and borrowing that cash from China, reducing the dollar to play money.

It should be abundantly clear by this point that the people we're told are "terrorists" and "insurgents" in Iraq and Afghanistan are in fact freedom fighters and patriots who are trying to rid their respective countries of brutal occupation by heavily armed, unhinged lunatics with every conceivable advantage in equipment and technology. In Iraq and Afghanistan, every day is Columbine, and we all pitch in our lunch money to buy Dylan's uzi.

In the coming decade the US will reap what it sowed abroad as soldiers come home to kill, rape and beat their way through their families and neighborhoods. Years ago the number of Vietnam vet suicides tripled the number of Vietnam vets killed in Vietnam, and I would expect that pattern to repeat as well with these wars. We should also see large numbers of homeless vets in our cities and towns in the coming decades. Large numbers of unemployed violent men with mental problems sleeping in the streets - "Hey, what's the worst that could happen?"

Bush and Obama are war criminals and we will all be heavily bearing the consequences of their brutal attempts at empire-building in the oil rich Middle East for decades to come. It was the (sorry-ass loser) Kerry campaign that killed any anti-war movement dead in this country in 2004, replaced by a movement to install people with a "D" after their name instead of an "R" to waste the country's youth and wealth on war, as if it really makes any difference. I recall the peace signs disappearing from local "liberal" windows in Summer '04, replaced by Kerry signs while he advocated what's now known as the "Bush surge." After this unlikable demi-billionaire warmongering wanker inevitably lost, no signs at all went back up in the windows, "liberal" America having sold out completely (again, as they always do), which is where we are 5 years later.

Not a day goes by that some dim cunt doesn't drive past me with an Obama '08 bumper sticker next to a peace sticker on the Volvo, which makes precisely the sense of a PETA patch sewn on a leather jacket. It's as if no one has ever listened to one of the man's speeches or seen one of his budget proposals. Obama and most Democrats have always been as committed to perpetual war as Dick Cheney, they just sound a little better if you don't listen to their entire sentences too carefully.

Had we elected Nader, Kucinich, or Paul we would have been completely withdrawn from both countries by now. We could spend a fraction of the war budget on trying to make our war puppets into functional human beings again, paid for everyone's health care, sent every child to college and still have enough money left over to cut taxes. Instead it'll be body bags and homeless Rambos well into the next decade. "Yes we can!"

Remember that Nixon was elected to "end the Vietnam war with honor", the immediate result being a ramping up of death on both sides and a spill-over of bombing and fighting into neighboring countries. Obama is being Nixon in record time. If you liked Cambodia, you'll love Pakistan.

Seeing as there's no draft, most of you found this just peachy. Let the poor kids kill, die and lose their fucking minds? "Yes, we can!"
Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Saturday, July 25, 2009

This week's quiz schedule

Sunday, July 26, 9pm
Lyons Den
848 S 2nd St.

(near 2nd & Christian Sts.)
Subject Round: ALCOHOL

Tuesday, July 28, 9pm
El Camino Real

1040 N. 2nd St.

(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round:
AMERICAN HISTORY

Wednesday, July 29, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round:
REALITY TV

Wednesday, July 29, ~10 pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar
1200 E. Passyunk Ave.

(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: STRINGED INSTRUMENTS

Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Saturday, July 18, 2009

This week's kwiz schedule

Sunday, July 19, 9pm
Lyons Den
848 S 2nd St.

(near 2nd & Christian Sts.)
Subject Round: TV FAMILIES

Tuesday, July 21, 9pm
El Camino Real

1040 N. 2nd St.

(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round:
EUROPEAN HISTORY

Wednesday, July 22, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round:
REFERENCE BOOKS

Wednesday, July 22, ~10 pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar
1200 E. Passyunk Ave.

(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: COUNTRY MUSIC

Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Sunday, July 12, 2009

This week's quiz schedule

Sunday, July 12, 9pm
Lyons Den
848 S 2nd St.

(near 2nd & Christian Sts.)
Subject Round: SUNDAY COMICS

Tuesday, July 14, 9pm
El Camino Real

1040 N. 2nd St.

(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: SIT-COMS


Wednesday, July 15, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: SECOND-LARGEST CITIES


Wednesday, July 15, ~10 pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar
1200 E. Passyunk Ave.

(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: BASEBALL'S ALL-STAR GAME

Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

This just in: Lyon's Den Sunday night quiz returns starting this week!

Starting this Sunday, 9pm, the Sunday night quiz returns after an 8-month absence.

Lyons Den
848 S 2nd St.

(near 2nd & Christian Sts.)
Philadelphia PA 19147
(215) 467-0100

See a
map here.

Robert McNamara takes his seat at the right hand of Satan


You might have heard that arch-evil war criminal fuck Robert McNamara finally kicked it at the ripe old age of 93, peacefully slipping away in his bed, not kicking wildly while crapping himself at the end of a long drop via a short rope. What few will say in clear terms is that the man was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths and maimings of tens of millions.

Robert S. McNamara, architect of and advocate for the ruinous war in Vietnam, died in his sleep--in sharp contrast to the 60,000 Americans who died horribly fighting a futile war the nation never needed to wage. Many thousands more suffered serious injuries and a larger number of Vietnam vets died as suicides. Estimates are that 4,000,000 Vietnamese died during the war. Our bombing and related actions spilled into Cambodia and Laos, killing millions there as well, and swelling the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. From a New York Times article:

Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary’s role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.In other words, he was responsible for making the military industrial complex a reality.

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.He could have worked to end the war, sparing the lives of perhaps thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese. He did not. Decades passed before he revealed the truth about himself and the war.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

And he wasn't just haunted by Vietnam. In interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris for the Fog of War, McNamara echoed doubts about US actions against the Japanese at the end of World War II.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.” ... “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked.

McNamara was part of the Kennedy-era "best and brightest," the Harvard (and it's always Harvard, isn't it?)-trained assholes who think their shit doesn't stink and send wave after wave of innocents to their doom by the million. This is the same sort of "best and brightest" of the Obama Administration who have the country sleepwalking into the same damn situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Somehow these people get the label "liberal." How about war criminal?

Astoundingly, McNamara also played a large role in the cover-up of Israel's 1967 USS Liberty attack on American naval personnel.

After years of abject failure writ huge by any reasonable standard in Southeast Asia, the lunatic American ruling class, always mindful of protecting their own, made this man the head of the fucking World Bank, in which post he assisted in the killing of millions more people through failed attempts at forcing our bad economic policies on the world, more even than he did forcing bad military policies on the world. This came with massive subsidies to thousands of failed dictators' and military juntas' absurdist economic projects which caused massive ecological and societal harm. (Having learned nothing, decades later Paul Wolfowitz, of "let's invade Iraq, easy as pie" fame, has also been installed as World Bank chief fuck-up. I wouldn't give the man keys to a golf cart.)

Our elites, having served the few at the greatest expense of the many, will always be promoted no matter how much blood is on their hands. See also as a more recent cognate Larry Summers, who wrecked Russia's economy (no small feat!) and led to the premature deaths of millions in the process, resigned from Harvard's presidency in disgrace having insulted most women, resigned from an international banking position after suggesting that toxic waste be pushed upon Africa, only to end up with a high position to steer America's economy under Obama... where he falls the fuck asleep in meetings. Apparently Obama couldn't figure out a way to get Charles Manson in the cabinet, so Larry had to do.

Henry Kissinger - please die soon, OK? It's well past time.
Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Monday, July 6, 2009

Foreclosure defense

Home defenders save homes from foreclosure from Bink on Vimeo.


Sign up to be a hero here. Woody Guthrie appeared to me in a July 4th vision and told me it's the only patriotic thing to do at present. Obama's pushing volunteerism (just like Pappy Bush), and I'm sure that this is precisely what he and his Wall Street backers had in mind... no?
Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites

Sunday, July 5, 2009

This week's quiz schedule

Tuesday, July 7, 9pm
El Camino Real

1040 N. 2nd St.

(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: FAMOUS HOUSES


Wednesday, July 8, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: QUESTIONS THAT ARE HARDER THAN YOU WOULD EXPECT


Wednesday, July 8, ~10 pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar
1200 E. Passyunk Ave.

(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: TV NEWS

Digg!
Add to Technorati Favorites