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Afterword: The Obama Victory

[November 7th, 2008]

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Postscript

[November 23rd, 2008]

We are in the final moments of the first billion dollar U.S. presidential campaign. This circus started two years ago. It has come down to B. "Slippery" Obama vs. J. "Crackbrain" McNasty, aka "Crackbrain McGeezer", in a quest to become the nominal leader of Ex America II, the lone surviving "Superpower". In fairness to both contestants, I refer to them below simply as B.S. Obama and The McGeezer.  

It is a deceptive choice which the Washington Establishment Party (WEP) is offering the confused, stupefied electorate. It should be evident by now to most seasoned, neutral observers that the Democrat and Republican parties constitute little more than two WEP front organizations and that there is no substantive differences between the parties, save for cosmetics, style and atmospherics. WEP is a revolving door for get-ahead career politicians. 

Representing the Democrats is B.S. Obama, an upstart whiz kid from Kenya, the Midwest of America, Hawaii and Harvard Law. The McGeezer is a party brat from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis who finished at the bottom of his class and who launched a second career by cashiering his first wife and marrying the beer baroness of Arizona, getting bankrolled, and thereby ending up as a permanent fixture on Capitol Hill. B.S. Obama is a brilliant talker, cerebral and slippery. The McGeezer is an ex-wrestler, an entitled roustabout with a hair-trigger temper who has more than a few screws loose. So there you are. In a word, bizarre.

By the way, Ex America II refers to the fact that the north American republic of 1789 is no more, that it was obliterated by the bloodbath called variously "the civil war" or "the war between the states" or by my Southern diehard friends, "the war of northern aggression". That war commenced in 1861. Thus ended the Republic of Washington, Jefferson and Adams and along with it the U.S. Constitution. In its place came Ex America, which lasted from 1865 until the Big Brother regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930's--or more precisely, until acts of serial high treason and malfeasance by FDR and his inner circle facilitated the "surprise" attack at Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan on December 7th, 1941. 

Since then, we have been living in the world of Ex America II, a world based upon fear, fantasy and force, similar to George Orwell's "perpetual war for perpetual peace"--to wit, World War II, the Cold War, and now Washington's crowning, contrived achievement known as GWOT, the "global war on terror". GWOT is predicated upon an alleged all-consuming "clash of civilizations" between what is left of the West and the religion of Islam.  

That's where the matter rests today, and that is what these two dubious professional politicians, B.S. Obama and The McGeezer, are fighting over. It does not matter which individual wins the prize of becoming POTUS 44. WEP will retain power, as before. And whoever controls WEP, stays in power. More fear, more fantasy, more force.

Edgar Allen Poe saw it coming from his vantage point within the time-frame of the original republic, pre Ex America. For example, in "The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall" (1835) Poe alludes to the regrettable circumstance "...of late years...the heads of all the people have been set agog with politics...." He was referring to the then-recent history in the immediate aftermath of the French and American Revolutions. 

Poe was a loner, a dreamer and a boozer who got himself kicked out of West Point, for reasons which remain unclear. He was also a genius and a writer who did not marry a millionairess. He longed for a golden age where humanity would care about beauty, art and philosophy--and less about money and politics. Poe had not been fooled by a New World faith in "democracy" and he was suspicious of “The Age of Reason”. He remained in dissidence. Fittingly, he was murdered in the process of being used to perpetrate voting fraud in Baltimore, at that time a major metropolis.

In point of fact, our current predicament begs the question, "Can democracy be regarded as a waste of time, as a wrong turn in the history of mankind?". My answer is yes, it probably can. Think of all the time and money wasted on these farcical elections, which wastage could be avoided if there only existed a system like that of the ancient Venetian Republic, wherein governance was left up to a patrician class comprised of an incorruptible, duty-bound citizenry with a nominal king, the Doge, who welded no real power.

In that way, at least, the average person would not be caught up in the vulgar spectacle of endless elections, which entertainment has only succeeded in putting mountebanks, opportunists and jackasses into office, and keeping them there. The grotesque 2008 U.S. presidential campaign now underway raises this fundamental question anew, and adds an exclamation mark to the question mark. Has democracy been rendered a joke? In any event, be advised that politics is passé and a pack of lies.

***

All of which compels a revisit to my good friend, the "Country Club Republican" of previous missives. She is agog with politics, like the rest of the country. As with most CCRs, E. is terrified by the Democrats, and especially by such an exotic character like B.S. Obama, who has arrived seemingly out of nowhere, promising everything. Remember, although E. regards G.W. Bush as a moron, he is still a Republican who has protected E. and her home town, New York City, from another terrorist attack. That’s her thinking, which via osmosis reflects the agitprop of “neocon” operative Robert Kagan, chief foreign policy advisor to The McGeezer.

Recall the mindset: E. has not turned against the war in Iraq. Why not? Because she has swallowed hook, line and sinker the "neocon" party line to the effect that "we are over there to keep them from attacking us over here" or some such nonsense. And like most Americans, the Iraq war and the wider GWOT have not perceptively impacted her daily life. The wars underway in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan presumably to protect E. and the rest of us are being fought in faraway places, out of sight and out of mind, as in the days of the Raj. So by default, E. remains a flag-waving CCR. 

What E. doesn't realize, of course, is that the maniacs who hit us on September 11th, 2001 did, indeed, come over here precisely because we were over there. By “we”, I mean Washington. By “over there”, I mean the Middle East. She does not appreciate that Washington's proactive involvement in that part of the world--primarily by promoting the Zionist colonial experiment in Palestine at the expense of the ethnically-cleansed Palestinians and by negatively impacting other Arabs in the immediate vicinity, namely in Lebanon and Syria--has created, over a span of decades, the Islamist/terrorist specter now confronting America and the West.  Due to “neocon”-inspired and directed disinformation, E. misses that point entirely. Well, maybe not entirely. 

E. does recognize, without having to read a book about the subject, that something called the "Israel Lobby" has been riding high in the saddle and exercises proprietary control over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. It is self-evident. But at the same time E. is certain there is nothing she or anybody else can do about it. The upshot? Since average Americans are powerless to alter Washington's one-sided pro-Zionist policy, there is no choice  in E.’s mind but to kill as many insurgents, malcontents, and terrorists created by this policy as fast as possible, before they cause trouble. In short, out of fear and cold calculation, E. remains a staunch supporter of The McGeezer, the avowed "neocon" candidate.

And what about this CCR's view of the current stock market blowup and the economic meltdown? I was puzzled by a recent e-mail I received from her on that subject. Sometimes it is hard to tell if E. is pulling my leg or if she is dead serious. After all, she's a CCR. Here's a sample from October 1st: 

"I TRULY BELIEVE THAT THE TALIBAN SENT PEOPLE OVER HERE TO MAKE CONTACT WITH MORTGAGE COMPANIES, GIVE MORTGAGES TO ALL THE MINORITIES THAT YOU CAN FIND, AND DESTROY THE COUNTRY... TAKE EUROPE AND ASIA...DOWN  WITH US.  CAN'T GET INTO USA TO BOMB, SO THIS WILL WORK. AND THEN CONTINUE ONTO WALL-STREET..."

Don't you love it? Granted, E.'s thinking here is consistent with The McGeezer's outlook and the general notion that Bush's self-destructive foreign policies have somehow "kept us safe" and willy-nilly prevented another terrorist attack on New York. Still, the rest of her comments appear a tad unrealistic and way, way over the top. Accordingly, I sent E. the following response:

"Has it not occurred to you that perhaps the mortgage companies sent their people over there to Afghanistan to find the Taliban and bring some of them back here to infiltrate the minorities so that Taliban supporters among the minorities could get big fat mortgages and destroy the country in the process, while enriching the big fat American CEO's? That makes more sense to me. We have got to stay on target, otherwise people will not take us seriously..." 

Okay, so far it's a joke--at least on my part. But then, after I received her next e-mail on the stock market blowup, I got to reconsidering my position. Here's the e-mail from E. of October 10th that changed my thinking: "IF THEY CAN'T COME BACK AND BOMB US, THEY WILL FIND ANOTHER WAY.. AND THEY DID... THE TALIBAN HAVE WON AGAIN!"

As nutty as it sounds, could E. be on to something? She is indeed, if you expand her thinking and connect the dots. In the grand scheme of things, E. regards the Taliban as the bad guys, as terrorists, as surrogates for every Islamic fanatic in the world, especially the terrorists from al Qaeda, who hate America because they hate our democracy, etcetera. Got it? There is a unitary enemy out there, an all-purpose bogeyman. No need for distinctions or flexible tactics.

Again, all this is consistent with the Cheney White House talking points and "neocon" propaganda, not to mention the zeitgeist of the mass media. As pointed out elsewhere, ignorance is good. It is very good indeed for those despicable characters who are in the business of manipulating the misinformed and gullible.  The latter constitute a vast majority of the American people. E. has been hoodwinked.

E. does not understand that the Taliban comprise an alliance of Pashtun tribesmen who are not happy that their country has been invaded and occupied by the U.S. Army and NATO troops. The Taliban are engaged in an asymmetric, guerrilla war against these outlanders in the exact same manner as the predecessors of the Taliban, the Islamist Muhajadeen, fought the Soviet military machine starting in 1979 and throughout the 1980's, assisted by massive infusions of money and guns from Washington, that is, from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Whose ox is being gored now as the result of prior U.S. intervention in this godforsaken landscape? Please note that B.S. Obama has declared his intention to reinvade Afghanistan, and throw more American blood and treasure into the fray. His foreign policy team is a chip off the Washington establishment block, comprising many Bill Clinton retreads. Such a move to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan would be worse than folly. It would amount to malfeasance.

Take note of a Reuters report from London of September 29th, 2008 which reads in part as follows:

Taliban leader Mullah Omar on Monday urged U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan to withdraw or face a similar defeat to occupying Soviet troops a generation ago.

"Reconsider your wrong decision of wrong occupation, and seek a safe exit to withdraw your forces," said the message, which the Taliban said came from Omar.

"If you leave our lands, we can arrange for you a reasonable opportunity for your departure," he said, adding that the Taliban posed no harm to anyone in the world.

If the occupation persisted, "you will be defeated in all parts of the world ... like the former Soviet Union", Omar said.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a Marxist government against mujahideen fighters, but was ground down by guerrilla warfare and withdrew in 1988-89.

Omar's apparently conciliatory remarks were reminiscent of statements by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in which he has offered to spare Western countries from attacks if they cease what he calls a war against Muslims. Western governments have always dismissed such offers out of hand.

Afghanistan expert Eric Margolis observed a week later, on October 6th, 2008: "For those who savor historical irony, the Soviet Empire collapsed in the years 1989-1991 because of an implosion of its economy brought on by a ruinous arms race with the United States and the heavy costs of occupying Afghanistan. Seventeen years later came the turn of the world’s other great imperial power, the United States. Lethally bloated by runaway debt, and burdened by 50% of the world’s military spending, the house of cards known as the US economy finally collapsed." 

Of course, the USSR did not implode in 1991 simply because of a guerilla war in Afghanistan and neither can the September/October 2008 collapse on Wall Street, and the world-wide repercussions from it, be accounted for entirely by America's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the case of the USSR, it had to contend to boot with the loadstone of communism. As for the USA, it has been dragged down by tremendous financial and military pressures brought about by the larger GWOT, which was the direct result of the 9/11 attacks, which in turn were the blowback from Washington's predatory foreign policy in the Middle East, which policy was and is mandated by Tel Aviv and its  many U.S. surrogates, fronted by Capitol Hill and the White House--all to the detriment of America, especially to the detriment of the average American who is picking up the colossal bill for this racket.

It is fast becoming apparent--even to my good CCR friend E.--that the unfolding U.S. economic crisis of 2008 is largely the result of enduring, idiotic U.S. foreign policy Diktats--primarily Washington’s pro-occupation and anti-Palestinian policy in the Middle East going back decades. It is this bipartisan, incendiary policy and its offshoots--e.g., the inexplicable American obsession with Iraq, resulting in murderous economic sanctions imposed upon its civilian population under President Clinton--which motivated the Arab terrorists of September 11th, 2001.

These coordinated terrorist attacks on the eastern seaboard of America triggered--or were the excuse for--a regime of “cheap money” and artificially low interest rates, promulgated by the U.S. central bank for years afterwards as part of a sustained effort to game Wall Street and inflate the U.S economy. You see the results.

The 9/11 atrocities also generated the Neocon hijacking of America by the  self-absorbed Cheney-Bush Administration, which hijacking begat the self-fulfilling, self-inflicted GWOT. As a consequence, the country is now saddled with unnecessary, ruinously expensive, and open-ended wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, paid for with billions of dollars borrowed from China and Japan. To what end?  Cui bono?

What the Washington-funded Muhajadeen did to the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980's is being replicated today--roughly-speaking and on a larger scale--to the quasi American empire or, if you prefer, to Pax Americana by Iraqi insurgents, by the rag-tag Taliban, and by the "neoconized" Bush Administration itself, as run by its murky and exra-constitutional CEO, Dick Cheney. In sum, Uncle Sam has shot himself in the foot. The Taliban are direct successors of the Muhajadeen whom Washington promoted to destabilize the USSR. Who is being destabilized now? I’ll tell you. The United States and the entire world. Do we need this?

America is hemorrhaging. This situation was completely preventable, and should have been avoided at all cost. GWOT is a front for militant Zionism, to further the Likud foreign policy agenda. It is a fool's errand for the United States. It is self-defeating and counter-productive for the future of the West. Like the current U.S. election, it is a grand distraction from reality. 

Washington is now being offered a deal to withdraw from Afghanistan by a one-eyed guerrilla leader who sleeps on a rug over a dirt floor. It is generally not a good idea to be stuck in a contest where you have everything to lose but your opponent has little or nothing to lose.  Just by being involved, you lose. This fact was beyond the mental horizons of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush.

At its source, the train wreck in Iraq and Afghanistan has been caused by the  injustice in Palestine perpetrated by Zionism and by the single-minded activities of the "Israel Lobby" in America, Europe and England. These machinations enabled and now perpetuate this selfsame injustice and have manufactured the factitious scenario, the “clash of civilizations”. Granted, there are many reasonable commentators in both America and Europe who find themselves incapable of making the connection. Of those that can, however, few dare to acknowledge it. So the charade and the fraud continue unabated. You see the results.

***

What we require now is an agog-with-politics antidote. I have just the ticket. It is a pocket-sized book entitled The Limits of Power by Colonel Andrew Bacevich. Insofar as he goes, which is far enough for most people, I must admit to agreeing with everything I have read. In fact, Limits backs up and confirms much of what I have written during the past five years about foreign affairs and contemporary history. Confirmation is a good thing, especially when coming from someone with far more real life experience than I possess. 

Bacevich graduated from West Point and fought in Vietnam; he is a scholar and historian, with a Ph.D from Princeton. He lost a son in Iraq in May 2007. Bacevich's critique of the so-called "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emption--it would be instructive to know who actually conceived the idea--and his castigation of the Iraq war are  both contained in a concise op-ed piece in the Boston Globe of March 1st, 2007.

Limits of Power amounts to a sweeping indictment of the American way of life, as Bacevich understands it. He makes the link between American "domestic dysfunction" and what he rightly regards as an errant U.S. foreign policy, the latter being in his view a reflection or manifestation of the former. He is not obsessed with G.W. Bush, current politics, or with the recent past. He takes a long look backward, and relies heavily upon the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr in his criticism of what America has done to others and to itself.

Bacevich challenges some very basic assumptions, foremost of which is the American concept of "freedom". It is "the altar at which Americans worship", but it has been "a mixed blessing" and is now little more than an "incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate." 

This is important because "freedom" has been, if you think about it, the basis--I would say the cover story--for U.S. foreign policy since the time of the Spanish American War of 1898. The idea is, America has it, and must perforce spread it. This presumed duty has been utilized to justify every sort of infamy and idiocy. It is the crux of the Wilsonian vision. It was the reason given for invading the Philippines in 1898 and for intervening in the Great War in Europe in 1917.  It was the predicate for FDR's interference in the Far East and in Europe in the late 1930's and is why he railroaded America into World War II in 1941.

Bacevich's point is that along the way Americans have lost their sense of humility, humanity and balance, and have developed a distorted vision of themselves. The result is that "hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expressions of American statecraft."

He rejects the commonly-held view that the present conflicts collectively known as GWOT are not of America's own making. He asserts, instead, that in the aftermath of the Cold War "the impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within." In short, the collective crisis we face is of our own making, the consequence of contradictions and false assumptions about America's place in the world.

True, this may all sound theoretical and academic, but in the book Bacevich supports his many assertions with the precision of an engineer. The book is a gem. It is an antidote to politics, because the author rises above domestic politics, holding both Republicans and Democrats culpable for the madness.  May I suggest that I covered some of the same ground in The Unauthorized World Situation Report (2005) and more recently in the long essay "Demise of American Empire" (June 2007).

In "Demise" I wrote the following:

"America’s current predicament on the world’s stage can be accurately diagnosed, but not so easily reversed. May I suggest that it is the result of two overly ambitious concepts in the realm of foreign affairs, which concepts have evolved over many decades, commencing around the start of the 20th Century, at the time of the Spanish-American war of 1898.

"First, there was the brainstorm borrowed from the British Empire experience, innocently conceived by President William McKinley and by his idealistic Secretary of State, John Hay, that to get America directly involved in overseeing the internal affairs of other nations was a brilliant, beneficent idea for all parties concerned. Hay and McKinley did not recognized it as inherently dishonest, at odds with the tradition of a republic born in revolt against an empire. They did not comprehend that it was meddling and officious. 

"Soon their idea was taken for granted in the hallways of the White House, starting with Teddy Roosevelt. By the time of Woodrow Wilson and that of his mysterious éminence grise, “Colonel” Edward House, American triumphalism was firmly entrenched. It was an article of faith that led to wars. Some were small, like the guerilla insurrection which broke out in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. Others were titanic, like the Second World War and its precursor, the Great War of 1914-18.

"Second, the entire body politic of America--not just “the elites” in Washington, but “the man in the street”--came to believe that the United States had somehow acquired the right, indeed the duty, to intervene in matters that were legitimately none of America’s business. It was a presumption which amounted to hubris across the board. There is no such right, duty or obligation. Ezra Pound stated in 1927: “The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs.” Pound was correct, and so was Confucius. But hubris is still with us, big time. Indeed, it remains the sine qua non of American foreign policy.

"No matter how unwise, deluded and suborned the politicians in Washington might be, no matter how powerful its various war lobbies and special interest groups might become, America could not have arrived at the point of being where it is today--an overextended and perhaps near bankrupt empire--unless the above two premises were in place and in play."

What Bacevich has provided, it seems to me, is the background, the warp and woof which elucidates why Washington found it possible, indeed relatively easy, to go crazy with a policy of overarching interventionism in the aftermath of the Cold War, even though this course of action was clearly ill-advised. The explanation is hubris, based upon self-deception and entitlement. Bacevich gives us the overall framework, but not the mechanics of what happened, not the men who made it happen. 

Bacevich does not tell us who pulled the trigger and why. Who took calculated advantage of this deep-rooted character flaw in the U.S. body politic at the end of the Cold War to advance a private agenda? To know all about that you need to turn to another recently-published book, entitled Transparent Cabal by Stephen Sniegoski. Read here an excellent review of it by ex-CIA analysts Bill and Cathleen Christison.

Based upon the Christisons' report, the book sounds like a gold mine, which I am sure it is. But I have not found the time to read it. You can get a feel for where Sniegoski is coming from (and where he has been) by reading his important, ahead-of-the-curve 2003 essay "War on Iraq, Conceived in Israel".

Afterword

[Friday, November 7th, 2008]

In the wake of the B.S. Obama landslide on Tuesday, my main concern from now until the inauguration in January is Dick Cheney, the CEO and éminence grise of the current Bush Administration. Aside from Cheney starting a full-scale war with Iran, my concern is for preservation of the historical record of the past eight years, specifically matters relating to the hijacking of the Executive Branch of the USG by the so-called "neocons". This hijacking began pre-9/11 and was finalized by 9/11.

Remember that when G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney took over Washington at the beginning of 2001, Ariel Sharon was in charge in Tel Aviv, and that the American "neocons" surrounding Cheney (who was their sponsor and frontman) were little more than Likud surrogates. This is what they have always been and what they remain today.

Most Americans still do not make the connection between the Iraq war and Israel, which is to say, the connection between the launching of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the U.S. "Israel Lobby". The thought police and the two major American political parties have been able, for the most part, to keep the lid on that scandal. Aside from Ariel Sharon, working through his agents in Washington and New York, the single person most responsible for carrying out the Iraq fiasco is Dick Cheney. Despite all his vast experience in Washington, we have to conclude now, based upon his track record under Bush Jr, that Dick Cheney's judgement has been significantly warped, probably due to heart-related health issues. 

In 2000, Texas Governor G. W. Bush was roughly similar to Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as we find her today and in the just-completed campaign. An airhead. A good talker. A fabulist. Former Secretary of State, George Schultz, was called in to sit down with G.W. and see if he (G.W.) could be programed and educated in foreign affairs. Bush was able to wing it, but he needed Cheney to govern. Cheney has been ultimately in charge of everything ever since. In September 2008 Cheney was ordered by a Federal Judge not to destroy any of his official papers. If we could figure out from these documents what was going on behind the scenes, we would know where all the bodies are buried.

Eight months into their first term in office, after the irresponsible outsourcing of U.S. Mideast policy to the unindicted war criminal Ariel Sharon, Cheney and Bush Jr. and America got hit with 9/11, which terrorist atrocity was an Arab payback for the Clinton years, in particular the phony, long-drawn-out Oslo "peace process" orchestrated by Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. The 9/11 attacks, about which the Mossad almost certainly had prior knowledge, brought about the Iraq war (and the destruction of Iraq as a nation-state) as well as sustained, artificially low U.S. interest rates. 

The election this week of B.S. Obama for POTUS 44 is a massive vote of no confidence in and revulsion against Cheney-Bush and their "neocon" war(s) and the imploding economy. Not for vindictive reasons, but for the sake of the country and honesty, the workings of Cheney-Bush Administration, aka The Cheney Regency, should be thoroughly reviewed and investigated. To do this, the records of its CEO would have to be safeguarded--not so much as evidence in a prosecution for malfeasance and criminal conspiracy, but in order that historians can try to figure out what the hell has been going on inside the worst Presidency in U.S. history. Does Obama have any interest in doing this? The short answer is, of course not. 

Why? Because the hijacking of America under Cheney-Bush was enabled by the Democratic leadership in Congress and by the Democratic establishment in Washington. At all times, it has been a joint project.

For example, the rush to invade Iraq was greased by Senator Joe Biden's hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the run-up to the war. In these hearings, Senator Biden, now Vice-President elect, was chairman of the committee, and he perfunctorily swallowed all the phony and mendacious premises proffered by the "neocons" to go to war.

For another, the October 11th, 2002 decision to vote "yes" for the preemptive invasion of Iraq was sanctioned and embraced by the Democrat leaders in the Senate and House largely to curry favor with the so-called "Israel Lobby" as part and parcel of the Democratic midterm election strategy of November 2002. The fact that Karl Rove was following the exact same strategy for Bush Jr. does not absolve the Democrats of their own chicanery, opportunism and hypocrisy.

One reason Bush (and Cheney) could not be impeached over any issue related to the Iraq invasion and occupation was that any impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney would necessarily amount to an indictment of the Democratic Party in addition to an unmasking of the real reasons for the war. Ergo, impeachment was taken off the table, no matter how clear it became that Cheney and Bush had committed impeachable offenses in the aftermath of 9/11.

*  

Note that right out of the box, B.S. Obama has chosen U.S. Representative Rahm Israel Emanuel from Chicago as chief of staff for the White House. Probably this was meant as a signal of reassurance to certain quarters, and should not be surprising. Obama is not an outsider. He is a professional Washington politician. As such, he cannot wander off the reservation. He knows what has worked to get him where he is. At bottom, the 2008 election has been a non-event, except for those individuals who will take over jobs from others who are temporarily departing the stage. It is a revolving door in Washington. It is one party with two faces, animated and manipulated by the same establishment. 

Emanuel's father is a Jewish immigrant from Palestine/Israel who was a member of the Irgun, a gang of Polish Jews who terrorized the British and the Arabs in the late 1940's in the good fight for Zionism. Rahm is an orthodox Jew who served as a volunteer in the Israel Army and is joined at the hip to AIPAC. As chief of staff to B.S. Obama, R.I. Emanuel will have the highest security clearance, with access to all U.S. intelligence as well as inside knowledge of White House policy. In effect, he will be taking the White House slot now occupied by the "neocon's neocon" Elliott Abrams, whom Dick Cheney and Karl Rove put in charge of U.S. Middle East policy. 

As such, R.I. Emanuel will become the number one Zionist point man inside the White House. Is anybody in Washington familiar with the concept known as conflict of interest? When it comes to the Middle East, apparently not. The whole issue is studiously ignored by everybody.

Let's face it, Obama is going to have his hands full with the world-wide economic implosion gifted to him by the incompetent Cheney Regency, the rotten Democratic establishment in Washington, and the crooks on Wall Street. Moreover, the "American people" remain unaware that U.S. foreign policy has been hijacked; in addition, they could not care less about the Palestinians or any other Arabs, all of whom they regard as very much a side issue. The Arabs have been thoroughly demonized by the press and the politicians. Arabs are considered to be either terrorists or oil extortionists. Ditto the Iranians.

Further, as stated above, Americans do not make the connection between the ruinous war in Iraq and the "Israel Lobby" or--more importantly--between the 9/11 atrocities and that same lobby, whose influence has determined U.S. foreign policy for years prior to the rise of Cheney and his "neocon" operatives. For Obama to devote serious time to what is euphemistically called "the peace process in the Middle East" would make him appear out of touch with reality, quixotic.

For anything of substance to take place, Obama would have to twist arms and put pressure on the obdurate leadership in Israel. That is not going to happen, certainly not now with R.I. Emanuel at his side. Obama would  instantaneously be isolated and marginalized. Washington being Washington, the  brain-dead Republicans would see an opening and jump on it, big time. Ergo, the "peace process" will be kicked down the road of history. 

America's current domestic headaches are directly related to its foreign policy nightmares. The biggest foreign policy nightmares for America by far are in the Middle East. This set of nightmares has been exacerbated beyond reason by Washington’s fixation favoring Zionism to the exclusion of America's own well-being, legitimate self-interest, safety and security.

The appointment of R.I. Emanuel to be chief of staff of the White House demonstrates beyond doubt that nothing is going to change under President Obama which might threaten to alter that pre-existing, blinkered, pro-Zionist policy entrenched at the White House since the presidency of LBJ.

**

Postscript

[Sunday, November 23rd, 2008]

Now that, second out of the box, Obama has appointed Senator Hillary R. Clinton to be Secretary of State, it is getting interesting, not to say murky. The idea occurred to me to write an item entitled "The Bridge President", about the upcoming Obillary administration, but it seems hardly worth the effort.

One must admit, looking back, that Obama's pervasive talk of “change” was always warm, fuzzy and undefined. What did people expect? Whatever wishful thing they wanted to. That was the idea. Any change from the disaster and the self-destructive insanity of Cheney-Bush would be most welcomed, of course. It is now clear as daylight that "change" was a come-on and little more than a campaign tactic. It served its purpose. And the McGeezer’s dreadful, embarrassing performance only added to the Obama momentum.

The Democratic establishment is back on stage--having recognized, adopted and co-opted a good talker. Its original candidate, H. R. Clinton, was a shoo-in who didn't quite cut it. Why? Because she is a colossal bore and a transparent fraud. Despite her best efforts, she could not con enough people to get the job done. No matter. With Obama as the charming frontman, things can rock along as before. No doubt Obama is surprised at his luck and success, and a bit frightened. Who can blame him? He serves as a bridge to an unpredictable, chastened and reduced entity: Ex America III.