I’ll be doing a live radio show with the Neighborhood Public Radio project this Saturday at 2:30pm PST, live from the Rubber Rose. It’ll be broadcast over the air in San Diego on [insert mystery frequency here] and also over the air in NYC on [find out what frequency they’re using in New York and type it here]. I plan to rant about the media, the presidential campaign, and talk about a new project I’m pondering, dealing with the looming energy/food/economic crises that are about to kick us all in the ovaries. The show should feature the return of my beloved BACKGROUND MUSIC.

Come on by, the hijinx run from 1-3pm, I believe. And if I’m wrong, you’re at the Rubber Rose, an art gallery and sex shop. I imagine you’ll find a way to spend the time…

(yes, I plan to fill in the [radio frequencies] above as soon as I get the corresponding data)

This is just embarassing. Newsweek publishes an article, in the form of a letter full of campaign tips for Barack Obama– written by Karl Rove.

It would be one thing if Rove was a freelance political consultant who worked for either party, or who had a specific ideology or issue that was his focus. But no. Rove has been a Republican political operative since he was 17 years old– for forty years. During his years in the Bush White House, he explicitly talked about his goal of permanent Republican control of the government.

But now, he’s generously giving advice to a democratic candidate. Because Karl Rove Kares.

Of course, the article is a hit piece. It’s sly, no doubt, but it’s hard not to see it’s intent. It fluffs up every potential Obama controversy, props up every trivial smear, slants every poll stat as a point on a downward spiral. An unbiased observer would probably come away from this article thinking that Barack Obama has a lot of work to do if he wants to be a popular political candidate.

However, I don’t really blame Rove for this. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, Rove gotta stab baby kittens in the eye with a shrimp fork. He’s evil and should be launched into the sun, but we shouldn’t exactly be surprised when he tries to do evil things.

But jesus Newsweek, this is pretty fucking embarassing on your part. Clearly this “author” has a conflict of interests, clearly he has an agenda, and you publish his piece anyway? Go put on your Shame Hats.

NY cops not punished for murdering an unarmed black man.

Again.

Yearly reminder: if you’re gonna go eat at a restaurant in a major city next week, you can eat at one of the restaurants listed here on April 24, and 25+% of your bill will be donated to a local AIDS-related charity. Not a huge deal, but if you were gonna go out anyway, you can do a tiny bit of good.

Maybe you folks know that I’m a big video game nerd. Been playing them since near birth, and I could write a book or two explaining what I like, analyzing what games say about their designers and audience, pointing out the few games that have intriguing politics, and slamming the ones who’s politics are terrible. This is a little bit about topics 2 and 4.

Maybe some of you are familiar with the Resident Evil series of video games (and their horrible spin-off movie franchise of the same name). The games are usually about cities overrun with zombies, and the cops and soldiers who kill those zombies (and various other genetic mutants spawned by the evil corporate villain). Resident Evil 4 changed up the series slightly by replacing most of the zombies with regular people who’d been infected with some disease or something which made them mindless, violent minions of… somebody, I don’t remember. The story was set in some fictional countryside in Spain, which meant that you were killing wave after wave of rural Spanish villagers* (or some game designers idea of Spanish villagers, anyway). True, the farmers were hurling pitchforks and carving knives at you, but it was a little more disturbing to be shooting old women in aprons than shooting moaning, mobile corpses.

Resident Evil 5 is set to be released in November, and a trailer for the game was screened for the public last July. It follows some of the formula of RE4, with the infected/maniac regular people instead of zombies, but this one is set in Africa. And the main character is a white guy. So the trailer is largely footage of a white guy shooting and killing wave after wave of black people. Black people who are acting like violent savages. In Africa**.

Yeah.

Now, coming to my main point, I found an article on a popular gamer website called Kotaku, that quoted an African-American journalist criticizing the racism, intentional and un-, within the game’s trailer. And in the first several hundred comments left by fans on the website, barely any of commenters sided with the journalist, even a little bit.

I’m not attacking the trailer or the game (although I probably will in a moment). You can find plenty of reasonable factors and context that mitigate or explain away some of the racism. But almost no one was saying “wow, a game where a white guy shoots up a whole bunch of black people? I can see how that might be a little racist.” Or “a game where all the black characters are mindless, bloodthirsty beasts? That might be offensive to some people.”

Instead, it was dozens and dozens and dozens of people loudly proclaiming that the journalist was playing “the race card” (I don’t even know what that means anymore), arguing that the journalist was the one who was racist, putting words into the journalist’s mouth, sarcastically attacking the journalist for not pointing out every other example of racism against every race in every video game ever, or people who just kept saying “I watched the trailer, and I don’t see anything racist about it.”

That’s depressing.

There are, of course, plenty of contextual and mitigating factors here: the game designers, who are Japanese, might not understand racial history in the United States; the game is set in Africa so it makes sense that most of the people in it are African; the Africans are acting violently not because they are stereotypes but because they’ve been bitten by the zombie maniac virus; the game itself might be much different than the trailer; the game is probably not intended to be racist and will probably not turn anyone into a racist. And I’m sure that some of the response is because gamers are very sensitive to criticism of their games; politicians and pundits love to blame video games for the ills of society and propose various forms of control and censorship of this beloved medium.

But still.

It saddens and frightens me that so many of these people who think they are “color blind” are actually “blind to racism.”

—
* For the record, I was creeped out that I was killing poor Spaniards in this game and never did finish. Nice imperial supremacy going on in that game, really. American agent drops into Spain and starts killing the inhabitants because he needs to resuce the President’s Daughter. Yes, the Spaniards did happen to be weird alien hybrid things, but they weren’t hurting anyone till Hero showed up.
** It was initially announced that the game was set in Haiti, now the game designers are saying it’s actually set in Africa.

Journalist Nir Rosen, testifying before the Senate:

BIDEN: Based on what you’ve said, there’s really no hope, is there? We should really get the hell out of there right now, right? There’s nothing to do.

ROSEN: As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power. I don’t think we’re there for the interests of the Iraqi people. I don’t think that’s ever been a motivation.

If anyone ever meets Nir Rosen, buy him a beer for me.

Sigh. April Fool’s Day is upon us again. Guess I won’t even try to write anything, because I don’t want to have to double-check my sources in case they’re just funnin’ me.

In other news, I’m totally a robot. Yup, wacky, I know.

Number one box office draw this weekend, is the movie “21″. It’s based on a true story of a group of MIT students who use their math skills to scam casinos and make lots of money. Unfortunately, it seems that the ringleaders of this scam were all Asian-Americans, but these three characters miraculously become white on the silver screen. Even worse, the students’ ethnicity was integral to their plans. They felt that young white guys blowing a million dollars at the casino would look suspicious, while rich Asian youths with money to burn would seem less so, due to stereotypes of rich foreign tourists. They were going touse these stereotypes to their advantage. Meaning that to the filmmakers actually had to change the plot of the film so that they could successfully whitewash the Asian characters. That’s how important it was to them to make sure the main characters were white.

Of course, this is because movie studio executives assume that the predominantly white American movie audience wants to see white people on screen instead of characters from other racial groups. Are they right to think this? Or can white audiences get behind films with casts where whites are a minority, or absent altogether?

This morning, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, ABC’s Good Morning America aired an interview with Vice President Cheney on the war. During the segment, Cheney flatly told White House correspondent Martha Raddatz that he doesn’t care about the American public’s views on the war:

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Well, we already knew that, but it’s nice to have him say it on camera.

And he’s right, you can’t be blown off course by fluctuations in polls. But since the majority of Americans have steadily opposed this war for over two years straight, you can’t exactly call these figures a “fluctuation”.

Although I started the Lying Media Bastards blog in April of 2002, you can really only access posts going back to December 2005. This is due to a software upgrade I installed at that time, which was unable to import all of those old entries for some reason. The old posts are, and always have been available here, in an archives directory of the website, but they are hard to navigate/interpret/read.

Just recently, I have figured out an imperfect way to re-incorporate those archives into the blog, so I’ve begun that process. At this point, I’ve restored the entries from April 2002 through April 2003 (and ran into some new problems with those entries, sigh). I’ll try to get those up in the next week or so. With everyone reflecting on the five years of war in Iraq, it seems useful to have all those past entries available.

Anyhow, those old entries can be viewed here. I’ve also added a link to archives in the first set of links in the upper right column if you want to view them at a later date.

In addition, I made separate pages for my “special report”, when I travelled to NYC for the Republican National Convention protests in 2004. You can find those here. With many photos.

LMB Radio 03-16-08

“Huh? He’s doing radio again?”

- Iraq: a nightmare, wrapped in a tragedy, wrapped in a farce
- neocons: even more batshit crazy than you guessed
- recommendations: The Power of Nightmares documentary, DMZ the book, It’s a Jungle Out There the book
- Obama Muslim rumor: it’s not a smear, it’s bigotry
- Music by Manu Chao, Santogold, and DJ Doc Rok

Had the epiphany earlier today that I could do radio shows in much less time if I gritted my teeth and left out my beloved background music. I look forward to the day when I have more spare time and can do my show in what I consider a proper fashion, but till then, maybe I can produce some of these short, stripped-down shows on a regular basis.

Also: I really need to stop doing “Iraq is so bad that…” posts and shows. It’s fucking bad. You know that. Do you need to know how bad?

The Power of Nightmares available for watching online here, transcripts here: Part I, Part II, andPart III.

Wow, a little bit of good local news for us San Diego folks. Blackwater USA, America’s favorite brand of mercenary, has been planning to construct and run a training camp in the rural San Diego county town of Potrero. This plan has been opposed by a dedicated group of activists, but San Diego is a pretty military-friendly town, I never knew how popular or unpopular the project would be.

But last week, Blackwater announced that they would no longer seek to build their training camp in Potrero. The activists are claiming victory, Blackwater is claiming that their decision is solely due to financial concerns and noise regulations, and I wonder how much last summer’s wildfires that tore through Potrero might have helped their decision along.

Any way you slice it, this is good news. Let’s keep an eye out for their next proposed base, and try to stop that one too.

Handy chart that tells which major corporations own your favorite organic foods. True, organic farming produces food using methods less likely to kill the sun or turn topsoil to toxin, but it’s also a jillion dollar industry, which means some pasty, cigar-chomping capitalist with a monocle and a waistcoat will need to get his monied fingers all over it.

“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.”

- George W. Bush, to US personnel in Afghanistan, March 13, 2008

US ally Turkey has invaded and bombed Iraq again last week.

The president of US enemy, Iran, visited Iraq last week, where he was warmly received by the Iraqi government.

Whose side are we on again?

I watched the documentary No End in Sight this weekend, a powerful and sobering film about some of the key decisions that led to the Iraq war, and the subsequent ruin of an occupation. If you’ve read Imperial Life in the Emerald City, not too much of the movie will surprise you, but it’s definitely worth a watch (and the book is worth a read). The one fact from the film that did take me aback was the time spent planning the post-war occupation of Iraq. The film tells you that prior to defeating Germany in WWII, the US government spent two years planning the eventual occupation of that country. How much time did the Bush administration spend planning the Iraqi occupation? 60 days, says the film, and even that answer gets undercut when members of that agency admit that they didn’t even meet until 10 days after they were hired, had a miniscule staff, and almost no resources.

The story of the Iraq war, is a simple one, really. A small group of arrogant idiots in the White House thought that they could spread “democracy” through the Middle East by replacing dictator Saddam Hussein with con man Ahmed Chalabi. By “spread” we mean “intimidate existing leaders and encourage coups against others” and by “democracy” we mean “any form of government that is friendly to US foreign policy and foreign corporate profit-lust.” I sometimes see this group of idiots (aka “neocons”) referred to as “reckless utopians”, as though we should applaud their intentions while weeping at the costs of their naivetie. But their intentions were not good, they were the same as so many people in power: the masses are sheep who should be controlled for the “greater good”; “leaders” like themselves are better than the rest of humanity; millions or billions of regular people may have to suffer or die to maintain “order”; since the leaders do such hard and important work, they deserve whatever power, perks and wealth they desire; and if the leaders can get away with all this, then the masses prove themselves to be the inferiors, and deserve whatever abuse and exploitation gets ladled out. That’s not utopian, that’s crass, ravenous, self-serving arrogance.

So that’s the story of the Iraq war. Powerful people who think they’re better than you and me decided that they could best maintain their dominance over other powerful people with deceit and slaughter.

Of course, discussing what got us into this war is sort of moot when compared to the question of what we should do in Iraq now, with its mountain of errors and rivers of carnage. And even that question is moot, as any answers provided by you and me won’t match up with the needs and goals of the folks in power who actually choose the policy.

Last batch of statistics I read said that around 70% of Iraqis want the US forces to leave their country. Many American politicians would quickly declare that if the US pulls out of Iraq, it will be a bloodbath. And it will certainly be terrible, no doubt about that. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Iraqi people, who know the situation far better than any senator or analyst in DC, still want the US to leave. And while large numbers of Americans are opposed to the war, a significant number seem to feel that we shouldn’t leave Iraq yet, either because it’s not right to leave the mess that we created, or because leaving without “finishing the job” will mean that the sacrifice and death of so many US soldiers was in vain.

Of course, the wishes of the Iraqi people should trump the wishes of the American public and American soldiers when it comes to what should happen in Iraq. Tragically, American soldiers were duped by this government, told that they were out to help the citizens of Iraq when the government did not really care about their desires and well-being (and increasingly shows that they don’t care about the well-being of the soldiers, either). Part of me is sympathetic, and does not want those soldiers and their families to have to accept these bleak and painful truths. But it is clear that the situation of Iraq is worse in by every conceivable measure since the invasion. And while it’s still possible for the US to do a little bit of good in Iraq, I don’t think it will be accomplished with bullets.

I don’t feel much need to address the “surge is working” point of view, but maybe I should. The “surge” was intended to reduce the violence in Baghdad so that political progress could be made in the Iraqi government. Violence dropped, but that was mostly due to the face that one side won. The Shia effectively control the city, and Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed. That’s why the civilian deaths are down. The reason US military deaths are down is a) Moqtada al-Sadr called a cease-fire between his Mahdi army and the US, b) the US is now working more through personnel-safe airstrikes, and c) the US has temporarily bought off the Sunni insurgency so that they’ll fight Al Qaeda in Iraq instead of American soldiers. But every savvy reporter that has spent time on the ground in Iraq says that Iraq does not really exist any more as a country, that the Iraqi government is a fiction, and that the Shia-Sunni civil war will likely re-ignite sometime between spring and fall.

How exactly are US troops going to fix this mess? Especially when the US government that gives them their marching orders has no real interest in actually helping the people we’ve fucked over?

Pakistan holds elections.

Pakistani people vote overwhelmingly against current president/thug Pervez Musharraf and his political party.

Bush administration asks Pakistan to keep Musharraf in power anyway.

Stolen from Atrios:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, [former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions Col. Morris Davis] provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

We must have fair trials, but no one can be found innocent. Good to know.

“What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!”

From xkcd, of course.

Related to my earlier post about American health care, we have this nice 2-part series by Canadian blogger Sara Robinson, debunking myths about the horrors and deviltry of the Canadian health care system. Granted, her very first point refutes the claim that Canada has “socialized medicine”, which makes the title of this post wrong, but, well, I already typed it and it’s kinda funny.

Mythbusting Canadian Health Care — Part I
Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, Part II: Debunking the Free Marketeers

Very informative, and the author is willing to point out flaws and problems with the Canadian system where she sees them.

Today is Valentine’s Day, when we all celebrate the way that St. Valentine drove all the snakes out of Ireland and into the Promised Land, where they were eaten by hungry lepers.

The sole reason I am writing this is to post this link. Option 1 is still one of the funniest things I have ever seen. You might want to be a little careful if you’re watching at work…

Back in the mid-90s, as the internet was beginning to take off, I took a college class about information technology and its impact on modern society. The moment that stays with me most from that class is a bit about the medical insurance industry. Some documentary we watched showed people very concerned about their personal health information, because if certain details of their medical conditions got out to insurance companies, it was possible that a) they would not be able to get affordable health insurance, b) they might lose health insurance they already had, and c) they might not be able to get health insurance, period, leaving their health at the mercy of what they could afford.

In other words, for some people, doctor-patient confidentiality can be literally a matter life or death.

What makes my blood boil is that the insurance industry is cheating. In a way, all insurance is a gamble. You are “betting” that paying a substantial fee every month will, in the long run, will be cheaper than the cost of medical treatments you may need now or in the future. And insurance companies are betting the opposite, that the cost of your medical bills will be less than the sum total of your monthly premiums. Of course, you rarely “win”, even if the odds pay off in your favor: an insurance company payout means your body is in trouble. “Woo hoo! I get a free medical treatment, and all I needed to do was get heart disease! (and spend 40 hours on the phone, jumping through insurance company hoops!)”

But rather than accept this wager and risk the odds, the insurance companies rig the game. First of all, they do their best to not pay for your medical treatments. Just as a casino would save money by boarding up the winings tray at the bottom of their slot machines, insurance companies use loopholes and technicalities to keep their cash from paying your bills. I haven’t seen “Sicko” yet, but I’m told there are scenes of people who are paying good money for their health insurance, only to find out that it doesn’t actually cover them if they get sick! Secondly, insurance companies try not to issue policies to people who may actually need medical treatment. And lastly (well, they probably have a much larger bag of tricks than this), they try to rid themselves of existing customers who are costing them money. They cheat at gambling by trying to eliminate risk altogether and abdicate all responsibilities, as if they were not a business providing a service in exchange for money. If they had their way, customers would simply mail in their checks, receive nothing in return, and die quietly when they could no longer afford it.

Which is what makes this so sleazy. Blue Cross (whose corporate parent Wellpoint made over $3 billion in profit in 2006), sent letters to doctors in California, encouraging them to violate doctor-patient confidentiality and snitch on their patients, in attempt to give Blue Cross grounds to cancel coverage for patients with certain health conditions (interestingly, one of the “health conditions” mentioned by Blue Cross is “pregnancy”).

But we do have a happy ending to this particularly scumbaggery: the California Medical Association publicly blasted Blue Cross, Arnold Schwarzenegger blasted Blue Cross, Hillary Clinton blasted Blue Cross, the media picked up the story, and Blue Cross has announced it will stop sending the letters. Not because of the morality or criticism, of course, but because they have “determined this letter is no longer necessary”. Right.

Of course, this leaves every other problem with America’s health industry intact.

In the past decade, a number of the labor struggles in the US have been tied explicitly to the matter of health insurance. Employees demand it because they can’t afford medical treatment otherwise, and employers try to jettison it to keep costs down and profits high. I keep wondering if one of these days we’ll see a coalition of businesses form to push for nationalized health care, to do away with this issue altogether. Maybe we’ll see a battle between auto companies, grocery stores, retail chains, and white collar corporations, doing battle with insurance companies for legislative change. Probably not, but it makes me scratch my head a little why all non-insurance businesses aren’t following this path.

Despite being forced from government service, prominent neocons– who as you’ll recall, have been wrong about ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING– keep fucking returning from the political grave. At the very, VERY least, these men should be laughingstocks, colossal jokes, branded as buffoons on par with Dan Quayle. AT LEAST.

But preferably they’d be in prison awaiting their war crimes tribunals, or dropped off in downtown Fallujah to explain to the Iraqi people how grateful they should be to America.

First unexpected resurrection: Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently this week, old Uncle Skeletor spoke at some defense industry conference arguing that the US government needed a new agency to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world by explaining to them that they are wrong and we are right. Because who are you gonna believe, the cluster bomb crater down the street, or some Republican operative in Langley posting to your local messageboard about the danger of Muslamic-o-facists?

Next up: Paul Wolfowitz. After stepping down as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz moved slantwise into a new position as president of the World Bank (a prestigious institution that purports* to help Third World countries with hefty development loans, but usually uses their financial leverage to break those countries open for privatization and foreign plunder). Hilariously, Wolfowitz made fighting corruption the centerpiece of his World Bank policies– and then was forced to resign when it was discovered that he had used his influence to get his girlfriend (who then worked for the World Bank as well) a cushy job at the State Department.

But, we find out today that Wolfowitz is bouncing back nicely, being appointed head of the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board, “which provides the department with independent advice on arms control and disarmament.” I think Wolfie’s definition of “arms control” is “neat handwriting on the checks you send to weapons manufacturers”.

And finally, John Bolton. He hasn’t been offered any spiffy new job since being canned as the most anti-UN ambassador to the UN, but he gets quoted in the media all the damn time! What the fuck is up with that? Motherfucker has been wrong about EVERYTHING, he’s CLEARLY a partisan operative with a hard-on for leveling Tehran, Havana and Caracas. If I was president of the Candymaker’s Association, and I told the press that candy was delicious, THAT WOULD NOT BE NEWS. But John Bolton tells the NYT that we’ve got to ram a cruise missile down Ahmadinejad’s windpipe and he gets headlines.

Sadly, neocons appear to be karma-proof.

—
* I can’t believe I used the word “purports”.

First of all, I simply cannot fully express my astonishment regarding coverage of the presidential elections. Commenter “Dead Civilian” is right, the elections are all rigged, and no matter what you want, you’re going to get a pro-corporate American imperialist for president. But the tidal wave of conversation, predictions and irrelevant analysis of hyperexaggerated non-events is blowing my mind. Even on its own terms, this news reporting is a travesty of a circus of a farce. Matt Taibbi has a few choice words on the subject.

But I was actually glad of the braying racket this week, because it helped muffle a story that had the potential to set us back on course for Cheney’s Glorious War Against Iran. You know the story, the one where some Iranian national guard speedboats got kinda close to some American warship boats, and somebody with a radio somewhere said some menacing things that, when combined together and doused with American paranoia, could have looked like a near-suicide attack by evil fanatics. And sadly, as though several decades of lies from the Pentagon was not a reason to show skepticism, the media aired the story with full military spin intact: those dangerous Iranians almost killed good, innocent, noble, sexy Americans, with no provocation whatsoever. And as all good Americans know, if someone tries to pick a fight with you, you have no choice but to drop several thousand tons of explosives on civilians from that same country. Cuz if you don’t, you’ll look like a pussy.

The most insane part of this barely newsworthy story, is that the Iranian behavior was repeatedly tagged as “provocative,” the Iranians were trying to provoke a fight. Which may or may not be true, I’m not sure. But you know what’s more provocative? Parking two aircraft carriers, dozens of fighter jets, and a series of battleships armed with cruise missiles off the coast of a nation you routinely and publicly discuss invading.

And if you say “that’s a good point”, you’re wrong. That’s a really, really obvious point. A point that should have occurred to every journalist and every news-watching American who heard this tale. If Iran had a few aircraft carriers off the cost of Florida, it’d be like Cuban Missile Crisis II. But we put some aircraft carriers 30 miles from the Iranian coast, and that’s no big deal. Cuz we’re America, we’re allowed to put our guns and planes and tanks anywhere, and all the other people of the world should be fine with that, cuz America Is Good.

Somehow we Americans have been blinded to our bizarre, global military omnipresence. We have military bases in dozens of countries around the world. That’s really weird, if you think about it. We’d boil with anger if some other country tried to set up a military base on our soil, but we expect everyone else to be totally fine when we build our GI Joe Rocket Command Center(tm) down the street from their kid’s elementary school. It’s all a part of the ubiquitous. unconscious American supremacist mindset that afflicts so many of this country’s citizens. It’s a theme I’ll be coming back to regularly.

Ironically, these manufactured scenarios of conflict and fear not only help bolster the war supporters in the US, but the hardliners and repressive elements of Iran as well. Every saber rattled by George W. makes the Iranian public edge a little closer to fellow powermonger Ahmadinejad (who, I’m always having to remind people, is not the leader of Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the leader of Iran, Ahmadinejad is just the president, a subordinate position to Khamenei’s). So all the back and forth snarling and snapping helps keep the hawks and mullahs in power, and the military industrial complex keeps on rolling.