Have Pity For the Bullies

Does she look like a teenager to you? If so, you're qualified to work for the Texas CPS: Sarah, a 37-year-old (yes, that's thirty-seven) "disputed minor" parent, embraces her beautiful daughter after the child was pried from the hands of her State-employed kidnappers.


It still isn't over.


Despite a consistent string of legal defeats and a resounding loss in the court of public opinion, the State of Texas and its child-abduction auxiliary are continuing their jihad against the families of Eldorado's FLDS community.


In doing so the criminals in this matter -- the child "protection" officials who kidnapped the children, and the law enforcement officers who acted as armed accomplices -- are, with the timely help of officials in Utah, making a desperation play for public sympathy by accusing the FLDS of plotting some variety of violent revenge.


Of course, in this entire affair, one side -- the State of Texas -- has told nothing but lies, while the other -- the FLDS parents -- has told the truth, as far as we've been able to determine. And exactly the same division is apparent regarding the use, or threatened use, of violence: One side deployed APCs and sniper teams, the other surrendered without resistance.


Yet we are to believe that the Mighty Child Protectors are mortally imperiled by ... well, by what, or by whom? By such FLDS "enforcers" as "Willie the Thug" Jessop, the FLDS spokesman at YFZ Ranch, last seen politely rebuffing a group of armed CPS investigators and Sheriff's deputies who sought to search the premises without a warrant? Apparently so.


Much of the information about the putative FLDS rogue's gallery was assembled by Kirk Smith, the Sheriff of Utah's Washington County (which includes Hildale, the Utah side of the border-straddling FLDS community). Smith had previously described the FLDS as "docile." Now he considers them to be potentially dangerous. The only thing that's changed is this: The people described in that dossier are now victims of government abuse, and are therefore suspected of harboring criminal intent by the criminals who victimized them.


On the basis of yet another fact-starved and insinuation-obese document, Judge Barbara Walther -- who issued the orders leading to the YFZ raid and the child abduction -- has been given round-the-clock protection by the Texas Rangers. Granted, Walther should be the subject of constant police attention -- but as an inmate, not a judge.


The CPS and its purulent little handmaiden, Judge Walther, were bench-slapped by the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, and then flattened by the state Supreme Court, both of which ruled that there was insufficient evidence to justify the seizure of more than 400 children from the YFZ Ranch.


The state High Court ordered Walther to return the abducted children to their parents. Her dilatory response to that order -- she needlessly forced the families to wait an additional weekend for the reunion -- was apparently designed to extract an agreement from the parents to live under a form of house arrest, subject to unannounced visits by the CPS. This was not only self-serving, dishonest, corrupt, and vindictive; it also displayed ill-disguised contempt for the state Supreme Court.


A decision yesterday by District Judge Martha Tanner kept the CPS's losing streak alive: Tanner granted Joseph and Lori Jessop a restraining order against the child-snatching Buttinskis. Tanner also reaffirmed an earlier order granting the Jessops custody over their children.


During Monday's hearing, CPS counsel Frank King whined for a change of venue to ... guess where? That's right: Barbara Walthers' courtroom, the only one in which the kidnappers have enjoyed any success.


Tanner wasn't having any of it, and her comments from the bench suggested that she's had a surfeit of the CPS's [insert sibilant slang term for fecal material].


"I am not going to allow CPS or any other agency to interfere with parents in this state," declared Judge Tanner, at the risk of inspiring the tiniest tremor of respect for at least one representative of the judicial branch.


Undeterred, the Texas attorney general's office has announced its intention to file an amended petition with the 4th Court of Appeals, in the hope -- once again -- of getting the Keate case in front of Barbara Walther once again. This, despite the fact the 4th Court already denied an earlier request of that sort on May 22nd.


I'm tempted to call this a uniquely precise exercise in judge-shopping, but I'm not sure that expression fits. The CPS isn't shopping the case around in search of a judge who's in the tank for them; they've found the judge they want -- one with a background in the totalitarian practice of "family law," one willing to ignore every principle of due process and defy every canon of judicial ethics in order to facilitate the CPS's assault on the FLDS community.


The melodramatic touch of assigning police protection to Walther, lest she fall by the hand of an FLDS "enforcer," is a transparent PR ploy, of course. But given the way the CPS has made her the indispensable judge, I'm cynical enough to wonder if the agency wouldn't welcome, or even provoke, an incident of some kind involving Walther, if only to overturn the game board and given them a chance to start over.


It must be said that the tenebrous world of Mormon Fundamentalism is inhabited by dangerous people, some of whom are deadly serious about the early Mormon doctrine of "blood atonement." This element of the subculture was capably explored in Jon Krakauer's chilling book Under the Banner of Heaven. Many other Mormon offshoots eschew the teaching and practice of that punitive doctrine. Prior to the ascent of Warren Jeffs as its prophet, the FLDS sect seemed to be less militant than some of its kindred, but this changed dramatically under his whimsical and dictatorial rule.


Many accounts of life in the FLDS -- such as the recently published memoir Escape, written by FLDS defector Carolyn Jessop -- plausibly depict the church as insular and suffocatingly authoritarian. But it is all but impossible to believe that the people in charge of it would be so irrationally violent as to attack a judge, even one as richly deserving of humiliation as Barbara Walther.


Carolyn Jessop was "married" as a "plural wife" to Merrill Jessop, the Bishop of the YFZ Ranch. His chief contribution to the present story was to order those living in the ranch to cooperate peacefully with the people who invaded their home and eventually kidnapped their children.


Once again, this is hardly the behavior of someone prepared to attack a judge.


To get a substantial sense of who threatens whom in this matter, it's useful to revisit the initial raids as they're described in the habeas corpus petition (.pdf) filed on behalf of the Keates and other FLDS parents whose children were seized from them at gunpoint.


In his sworn testimony, LeLand Keate describes how FLDS men -- "unarmed and praying" -- were "surrounded by armed and nervous law enforcement personnel" on the grounds outside the temple, the central edifice of the FLDS settlement.


An APC was used to force the unarmed men aside so that the temple, a sacred site to the FLDS, could be searched. Keate "saw some of the officers with tears in their eyes, a State trooper crying and some officers even put their weapons down," continues the account.


According to another account provided in the petition, as "the men went down on their knees and started to pray" in front of their temple, a witness "heard law enforcement officials cock their weapons."


Think what one will of the beliefs and practices of the FLDS men in that situation, it's clear that the only "threat" they represented to those who invaded their home was the possibility that their helplessness would leave at least some of the assailants paralyzed with shame.


Unfortunately, most of those assigned to attack the FLDS were better-suited for the mission. Later that same evening, while the Keate family was kneeling in prayer, "two State police officers and CPS officials" knocked on the door. When Keate answered, the officials asked "if he knew what was going to happen and he replied [that] based on what he had seen and been told ... they were going to take his family from him."


The intruders then rounded up the Keate children, including their five-year-old son, who was dragged away while screaming, "You don't take me from my mother!" Keate's wife was taken with the children to a local coliseum. When she asked to speak with an attorney, she was told "she did not deserve an attorney until she was 18 years old" -- a compound lie, since it included the assumption that the adult mother was a "contested minor."


When Mrs. Keate produced her driver's license, CPS officials told her it was a fake. When she and her children were relocated a few days later, Keate discovered that CPS had stolen the license from her luggage.


The experience of the Rulon Keate family -- which lived next to LeLand Keate's family in the ranch -- was very similar. The family was singing hymns together as part of a study and worship class when armed men knocked on the door.


"We know you're in there," one of them bellowed. "We'll break down your door." Upon answering the door Keate was told that the visitors -- Texas Rangers and other unidentified "armed men" -- had a warrant to search the home. Rulon asked to see the warrant. He was told the raiding party didn't have it in their possession -- which means they had no legal right to force their way into the home. Within a few minutes the invaders had gathered the children and herded them onto a bus.


These accounts are bound by thematic thread -- the arrogant, lawless violence of the CPS and its hired muscle in dealing with a community of helpless eccentrics with neither the means nor the intent to strike back.


And now we're invited to have pity for the bullies because they've lost every legal round, save those played in their home court, the one presided over by Judge Walther.


As noted above, this affair is far from over. Armed with as much money as it can extort from the taxpayers, the Texas CPS is entrenching itself for a war of attrition. And reinforcements are on their way.


Legal officials from four states (Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas) recently gathered in Las Vegas -- the world's leading producer of instant, disposable marriages -- to work out a collaborative arrangement to go after FLDS polygamists. That effort will build on the documents illegally seized during the FLDS raid. And it will almost certainly result in the tragic -- albeit, for some people, lucrative -- displacement of tens of thousands of FLDS children throughout the region.


Hence the importance of "re-branding" the FLDS as a domestic terrorist group of sorts. And in this connection it's interesting to see that two memoirs from FLDS defectors published just in time for the YFZ raid -- Carolyn Jessop's Escape, and Jessica Wall's Stolen Innocence -- will be made into motion pictures, most likely of the made-for-TV variety to be put into heavy rotation on Lifetime, aka "television for women who hate men."



On Sale Now!











Dum spiro, pugno!

"Stimulus" Spending: Making The Dead Parrot Twitch

Last week, published comments by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert regarding the likelihood of war between the U.S. and Iran caused the price of oil to surge to roughly $138 a barrel -- and the Dow to shed nearly 400 points.


It's actually worse than this chart would lead us to believe.









Delphic utterances delivered today by Federal Reserve commissary Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York prompted a mild market rally and lent some transient luster to the ever-depreciating greenback.


Rarely have we been able to witness, within such a compressed time-frame, such a compelling illustration of the fact that the economic destiny of our respective households is controlled by people over whom we exercise no controlling authority.


Bernanke's comments suppurated Panglossian self-approval: Thanks to his own inspired decisions, insisted Bernanke, "The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished."


Olympian utterances of this kind, which are considered self-ratifying, usually generate an economic placebo effect, and Bernanke's comments did conjure up an exceptionally modest market rally.


But there are limits even to the investor class's capacity for self-deception. At some point they're going to have to stop admiring the beautiful plumage and admit that the damn parrot is dead -- no matter how many times Bernanke reaches over and shoves the cage to make the bird's lifeless body twitch.




I'm betting that moment will come sometime after suitable provision has been made to bail out the major investment houses at the expense of those who actually work for a living.


And this brings us to the subject of Timothy Geithner's speech -- which was probably thrashed out in consultation with like-minded Mandarins at last week's Bilderberg meeting.


In his address to the Economic Club of New York, Geithner, a major architect of the Fed's taxpayer-backed $29 billion rescue of the fatally illiquid Bear Stearns investment house, left no self-admiring plaudit unspoken, no hymn to his own prudence unsung.


"Although we assumed some risk in this transaction," Geithner declared, "that risk is modest in comparison to the risk of very substantial damage to the financial system and the economy as a whole that would have accompanied [Bear Stearns'] default."


It must first be understood that the "risk" referred to here is not to Geithner or anybody else in the world of elite finance, but rather to the working class, who will eventually absorb the costs of the Fed-backed buyout of Bear Stearns.


The same is true of any other investment bank that partakes of the Fed's beneficence -- with Lehman Brothers apparently moving to the head of the queue. When he referred to the possibility of "substantial damage" to the economy had Bear Stearns collapsed, Geithner understated the potential catastrophe by at least an order of magnitude.


A Bear Stearns melt-down could well have ignited the derivatives market, with literally apocalyptic consequences for the world economy. Be not deceived: The derivatives market is going to burn. The Fed is simply trying to contain the damage long enough to ensure that what remains of the Middle Class will be the first fed to the fire.


This is the point of the "reform" proposed by Geithner in his speech and an op-ed published in the Financial Times. Geithner's arrangement would put the Fed in charge of a "unified regulatory framework" for the global financial system, and making permanent "some of the new liquidity facilities put in place during the credit crisis...."


"Liquidity facilities," deprived of euphemistic camouflage, refers to inflation -- the creation of credit or "money" to bail out politically connected investment firms. Central banks around the world have been pitching in to assist the Fed in carrying out this vital mission on behalf of corporate socialism, which helps explain why consumers world-wide are finding it increasingly difficult to pay for essentials -- such as food for their families, and the energy needed to prepare it.


Disfigured by greed, enslaved by an addiction to power: The Nazgul, or "Ring-Wraiths" from Tolkien's Middle Earth (left and below), were nine mortal kings whose incontinent lust for power led them to become the undead minions of Sauron.


But this system doesn't operate as seamlessly as the Fed desires. Which is why, as a solution to a crisis of its own creation, the Fed wants to make official its informal status as the One Central Bank to Rule Them All -- the Primus Inter Pares of the Global Financial Nazgul.

While the details of this division of power are worked out, our rulers still confront -- for the moment, at least -- the annoying and untidy business of tranquilizing the masses. Hence the distribution of the much-discussed "stimulus" checks, the current -- but by no means the last -- effort to make the dead parrot economy twitch.


Rather than spending the checks on ephemeral consumer goods -- which is, apparently, our patriotic duty -- many Americans have seen the tax "refund" immediately absorbed by sharply higher energy and food prices.

Of course, as economic analyst Max Keiser points out, the most provident thing Americans could have done with their "stimulus" checks would have been to leave them them uncashed:


"If every American had said, `No thank you' to Bush's stimulus check and refused to cash them, the value of the dollars in your pocket right now, in terms of their purchasing power would go up by a factor greater than the face value ($600) of the stimulus check. In other words, if you didn't spend these checks, you'd be richer for it.


The reason being that America does not have a hard-money economy, it's a debt-based fiat currency economy. All the money in circulation in America has been borrowed and then re-lent. So borrowing more money ($168 billion for the stimulus package) on top of America's current multi-trillion debt load will continue the Bush-Paulson-Bernanke trend of debasing the purchasing power of your money and, therefore, raise the price of goods and services by more than the $600 `gift'...."


It is a testament to the depraved, malicious ingenuity of our rulers that they devised a way to make a "gift" to us of our own plundered wealth, and then deliver it to us in a fashion that makes us poorer for receiving it.


And of course, the typical American household is so utterly broke than even those of us who understand the logic of Mr. Keiser's explanation find it almost impossible to resist spending the "stimulus" check in order to minimize the slippage in our standard of living.


(Click to enlarge.)


But our living standards will continue slipping, because our debt- and fraud-based economic system places the means of protecting our earnings beyond our control.


So common Americans liquidate their household possessions -- not to pay off debt ala Dave Ramsey, but rather to pay for gas and food -- explore the possibilities of the barter system (which the IRS has already managed to infiltrate), and -- in some extreme cases -- contemplate the possibility of obtaining dual citizenship in EU nations in order to find work abroad.



Meanwhile, the lords of the global economy labor quietly and in secrecy to perfect the mechanism of subsidizing the super-rich by debasing what the rest of us manage to earn and save.

















Keeping the rabble at bay: Police provide taxpayer-funded protection as global elites gather to plan our future at last week's Bilderberg meeting in Virginia. (Infowars.com)


If enough people understood how this system of plunder operates, the lifeless bodies of at least some of those responsible for this system would be decorating lampposts across our long-suffering land.

This explains why our rulers, like their counterparts in ages past, have taken great care to win and keep the loyalty of the legions.



On sale now!










Dum spiro, pugno!

The Depraved Majesty of Totalitarian Democracy

Is it Krushchev? Is it Lancelot Link's nemesis, Baron von Butcher? No, it's a little of both: It's the Grand and Glorious Decider in full General Urko mode.


After four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and their lifeless, butchered bodies publicly displayed by gleeful insurgents in March 2004, George W. Bush was handed one of those "leadership moments" so earnestly lusted after by incorrigible narcissists of his variety.


Summoning every resource of eloquence and inspiration at his disposal, Bush -- according to the newly published memoir by Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq -- disgorged what he probably thought was a masterpiece of Churchillian oratory in a videoconference with his national security team and commanding generals in Iraq:

"Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

This harangue was roughly equal parts towel-snapping frat-boy faux bravado, corporate seminar positive thinking dogma, partially digested talk radio sound-bites, and reheated Brezhnev-era Soviet revolutionary cant served up in one borderline-aphasic seizure.


Picking carefully through this slurry with a pair of tweezers we can extract one expression that nearly qualifies as a complete thought: The Marxoid imprecation against those who would "stop the march of Democracy" in Iraq and, presumably, elsewhere.


In fact, it was the audacity displayed by the residents of Fallujah in setting up their own self-governing institutions after the U.S. invasion that attracted the murderous attentions of Bush and his adult handlers.


Jeremy Scahill, in his exceptionally valuable study of Blackwater, Inc., points out that after the invasion "Fallujans had organized themselves and, before U.S. forces entered the city, created a local system of governance -- appointing a Civil Management Council with a manager and mayor -- in direct affront to the authority of the occupation."


Human Rights Watch reports that in Fallujah, the management of the city's public and private assets was apportioned among the various tribes, and arrangement one could call a form of checks and balances. The local hospital contracted with local militiamen to provide security. And local Imams "urged the public to respect law and order."


"Are you finished democratizing my city? Can I come out?"


What is described here is a rudimentary and very fragile form of republican self-government, albeit of a form based on cultural assumptions substantially different from those that informed our own Founders. So of course it had to be destroyed in the interests of the Bushevik Global Democratic Revolution.


Fallujah suffered greatly in the first Gulf War: A February 13 aerial bombing attack on a bridge spanning the Euphrates. The first airstrike failed to bring down the bridge. During the second, a half-dozen of the laser-guided "precision" missiles malfunctioned, missing the target and hitting a nearby residential neighborhood, an apartment building, and a crowded market. Scores were killed, hundreds more were wounded.


By the time the Bush family stretched forth its hand a second time to confer the blessings of armed benevolence upon the ungrateful Iraqis, Fallujah had become known as a stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-American hostility. This shouldn't surprise anyone with a particle of understanding of human nature. Which means it was utterly mystifying to those whose minds are incurably hostage to the tenets of totalitarian democracy.


You see, "Democracy" is the sanctified name used to describe whatever Washington sees fit to inflict on any community -- foreign or domestic -- it targets. And the objective of planting and nurturing democracy consecrates any means to bring about that end.


Shortly after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, a contingent of Marines occupied Fallujah, seizing the Al Qaed ("The Leader") School on Hay Nazzal Street as its headquarters. Since the reaction to this action was entirely predictable, the seizure has to be considered a deliberate provocation.


Opposition quickly coalesced, and a mob gathered around the school -- as well as Ba'ath Party HQ, also occupied by US troops -- to chant defiant slogans. The protest promoted Lt. Col, Eric Nantz, the U.S. commander in Fallujah, to warn the crowd via loudspeaker that the demonstration "could be considered a hostile act and would be engaged with deadly force.


At some point, a U.S. soldier was hit by a rock thrown by a demonstrator, and what had been a protest turned into a massacre. A hail of gunfire erupted, and hundreds of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered. Some eyewitnesses testify that U.S. troops ordered ambulance drivers away from the scene as civilians died in agony.


This all happened roughly a year before the death of four Blackwater operators who were sent, ill-prepared and with inadequate support, on a very badly planned mission in Fallujah.


It is tragically typical of the American mass mind -- at least, that small portion of it that still pays attention to the ongoing national crime in Iraq -- that the death of four mercenaries in the service of Washington's empire has become known as the "Fallujah Massacre," and -- of course -- there is no corresponding name for the murder of hundreds of Iraqis by American forces in 1991 and April 2003. Likewise, no name has been given to the breathtakingly savage campaign of detention, regimentation, state terrorism, and mass murder that the Bush Regime conducted in an attempt to impose democracy on Fallujah.


The death of four Blackwater operatives -- whose survivors were stiff-armed by both that politically connected corporation and the government it serves so dutifully -- gave the Regime "the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country," recounts Scahill. And remember: The triumph of "democracy" meant nothing more or less than uncontested U.S. control over Iraq.


In April 2004, Fallujah was encircled by U.S. troops and fenced in with concertina wire, and then Operation Vigilant Resolve began. According to on-site reports from both "embedded" and independent sources, occupation forces within the city seized control of the main hospital to prevent its use in treating the wounded. Air assaults destroyed the power plant and the main mosque.


Platoons were dispersed throughout the city armed with loudspeakers and a vocabulary of exquisitely profane insults compiled by psy-ops specialists as a way of luring resistance fighters out from hiding. This "insult-and-shoot" tactic was eagerly taken up by platoons throughout the city: U.S. troops, to the accompaniment of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Hell's Bells," pumped out a steady stream of profanity and then mercilessly gunned down those Fallujans who rose in defense of their community's honor.


Warplanes dropped their lethal payloads of 2,000-pound bombs on the city; AC-130 Spectre gunships capable of demolishing city blocks in minutes were a common sight in the skies above Fallujah. A doctor from Baghdad who witnessed the death toll later commented: "There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans did to innocent people."


Yet Fallujah refused to be "pacified," let alone "democratized."


"As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge," then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers testified before Congress on Hitler's birthday (April 20). Imitating the propaganda style of Hitler's regime, Myers described the inhabitants of the city as non-human vermin fit only for extermination: "We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat's nest, that is still festering today...."


The second assault on Fallujah began shortly after Bush's triumph in the November 2004 election. This time, the same Empire that supplied Saddam with chemical weapons, and then execrated him as a singular monster for using them "against his own people," cut out the Middle-Man entirely, using white phosphorous munitions against the "rat's nest" in Fallujah.


This was what the bloody-handed Bushling had in what passes for his mind when he urged the annihilation of those who stood athwart the "march of democracy" in Iraq.


Faoud Ajami, an apologist for the neo-con wing of the Imperial ruling elite, is every bit as Arab as Vidkun Quisling was Norwegian. A few days ago Ajami -- who is called on occasionally by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to put a mock-academic gloss on the Regime's depraved ambitions -- decanted another dram of a familiar Establishment whine that is not improving with age: The plaint that it's simply unfair to judge the Iraq war, and the Warmakers, by the results of their policies and the facts as we now know them.


Ajami was provoked by Scott McClellan's memoirs, in which the erstwhile White House spokesliar tries to come clean about at least some of the deceptions that led to the invasion.


According to neo-con apologist Faoud Ajami, this little boy from Fallujah had to be mutilated because Saddam "taunted" the US Government. If that makes sense to you, you're qualified to teach at Johns Hopkins University.


Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami pouts that McClellan's apostasy from the Warmakers' cult comes "in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power."


So ... an aggressive war simply had to be waged because Saddam had "taunted" the Empire, by refusing to duck or scurry for cover?


That is a war aim worthy of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including more than 4,000 Americans?


This is the same quasi-thought, albeit expressed in slightly more elevated diction, that was given voice a year ago by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: In a televised interview, Friedman said that a good and sufficient reason to invade Iraq was because "we" could, as a way of telling the Arab world, "Well, suck on this."


While Ajami avoids Friedman's use of urban patois -- which is singularly unconvincing, coming from a chinless, chest-less nebbish who probably can't do a single pushup, much less throw a decent punch -- he likewise insists that "democracy" cannot be victorious until all people everywhere, great and small, bow before the Empire's scepter.


Ann Coulter, who could probably take either Friedman or Ajami in a fist-fight, once reduced the discussion to a metaphor derived from prison rape: By ordering the invasion of Iraq, Coulter told an audience in mid-2003, Bush had "made the Middle East his bitch."


Well... not exactly. The problem, of course, is that neither Iraq nor the Middle East has been domesticated by the Empire, and never will. But the ongoing imperial wars will prove a splendid way to destroy whatever remains of American prosperity and national independence, as well as to flush out and eradicate anybody who remembers and seeks to restore the old republic.


"I don't care if it created more enemies," the Bushling spat at NBC News correspondent Richard Engel in a 2007 interview. "I had to act." To the same reporter, Bush blithely admitted that the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years." And his administration is taking steps right now to ensure that we will remain mired in Iraq and the region for at least two more generations.


Bush and his claque are seeking a special agreement with the Iraqi government to retain fifty permanent military bases in that country, and to provide permanent immunity for U.S. personnel stationed there. In familiar fashion, George the Dumber insists that congressional approval of this proposal -- which is a treaty by any honest use of language -- does not require Senate approval or congressional action of any kind.


Heroic armed missionaries of Democracy confront violent Iraqi ingrates -- at least, that's how the Regime and its apologists expect us to view this photograph.



Iraqi government officials protest that such an arrangement would entirely nullify Iraqi sovereignty. Ah, but Iraqi sovereignty, like all other principles, people, institutions, laws, or considerations, must yield to the imperatives of Washington's rule, aka Democracy. To that end, the Regime that rules us "is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government" into signing that agreement by July 31, reports the estimable Patrick Cockburn of Britain's Independent newspaper.


To many observers this appears to be simple, vulgar extortion.


This conclusion is entirely unfair, of course. It's democratic extortion -- surely, the noblest kind.


On sale now!












Are you on their little List? Probably -- if you've done anything worthwhile for freedom.