U.S. Media Propagandists Rush to Take Advantage of Murder of 5 Newspaper Staffers in Annapolis, MD

In a naked pitch for public sympathy, major "news" media all over the U.S. have made the murder of five employees at an obscure local newspaper the top national story of the day for several days running.

A vicious jackass, angry over accurate reporting of his conviction for stalking a women, attacked the offices of the Capital Gazette paper in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot to death five workers and wounded six others.

U.S. establishment media of all stripes immediately went into "national grief" mode.

Let's put this in perspective.

Every day, people are murdered in the U.S. Thousands are murdered every year.

They are auto mechanics, secretaries, cashiers, air conditioner repairmen, trash collectors, accountants, construction workers, computer technicians, taxi drivers, dietitians, librarians, cooks, bank tellers... do you see where I'm going with this?

What's so special about the particular occupation, "newspaper employee"?

The establishment media feels itself under heavy assault in the Age of Trump, and feels the need to generate public sympathy for itself. Hence the saturation coverage.

The two New York City tabloid rags made it their front page story- as if it had happened in their offices.

The government-established radio propaganda network NPR (National Public Radio) waxed hysterical, with this verbiage: "the deadly shooting an attack on free speech," and it's "courageous" of the reporters at the Capital Gazette to cover the story of their colleagues deaths.

Huh? Why wouldn't they cover it? And given that the killer was immediately arrested at the scene, and denied bail, what's so damn "courageous" about reporting it? Weird assertion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media barely makes a peep about the ongoing slaughter of journalists in Mexico, for example. Or the persecution of journalists in Turkey, who are regularly jailed on bogus "terrorism" and "coup conspiracy" charges by the autocrat who rules there, Erdogan. There are innumerable other examples of U.S. "journalists" indifference to the murder and oppression of journalists.

How about all the times the U.S. bombed the offices of Al-Jazeera? Nary a word in U.S. establishment media.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are demonized by U.S. media and subjected to a relentless campaign by the U.S. government aimed at their destruction. WikiLeaks makes information available to the public. That is journalism!

Hey, here's another one. The U.S. government murdered U.S. journalist Michael Hastings. The attitude of the U.S. media towards that one was "good riddance."

So I find this cynical opportunism by U.S. establishment propagandists to generate sympathy for themselves disgusting. They spent 365 days cheerleading for corporate oligarchic capitalism and aiding and abetting the crimes of the U.S. state, domestic and foreign, with their lies and coverups.

They are accomplices to the murders of millions of people killed as a result of U.S. aggression and U.S. coups that install and support fascist death squad regimes. They want me to feel sorry for them because five people employed by some newspaper no one outside of Annapolis has ever heard of got killed?

Please.

Trump Adopts Tent Concentration Camp Idea From His Hero, Fascist Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Trump wants to imprison tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the three Central American hellholes the U.S. deliberately created by its policies going back decades, at least since the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala that destroyed democracy in that country, ordered by Eisenhower. His plan now is to create tent concentration camps on military bases. This replicates the tent concentration camp the notorious sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona created to imprison "illegal" immigrants.

The Obama regime let Arpaio get away out outrageous civil and human rights violations for years, finally forced to act very late. If Obama had been a moral human being and acted in a timely fashion, Arpaio could have been stopped and punished earlier. As it is, Arpaio defied a Federal court order and was ultimately convicted of contempt of court. Trump rescued him with a presidential pardon, which erases the conviction. (A commutation is a reduction in sentence.)

The other two nations whose helpless citizens are fleeing to escape death are Honduras, victim of an Obama-regime coup about which Hillary Clinton bragged of her role in. She was Secretary of Stte and instrumental in using U.S. coercion to force other nations to recognize the illegitimate coup regime, which went on to run a death squad government. Then there's El Salvador, scene of a savage fascist war against the poor and leftist insurgents, with first Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan throwing the weight of the U.S. behind the death squaders, as usual.

Trump Tries To Evade Responsibility for His Cruel Treatment of Refugees With Despicable Lies

Trump may have sunk to a new low of brazen, vulgar, disgusting lying with his defensive attack on Democrats for his own vicious policy of tearing children away from their parents- parents who are would-be immigrants either seeking political asylum (meaning they are refugees, NOT "illegal immigrants" as the U.S. media- and BBC too- has it, or "criminals" as Grand Inquisitor Attorney General of the U.S. and head of the "Justice" Department Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his boss, president Donald J. "Jackass" Trump, have it) or are forced to try and sneak across the Mexican U.S. border to save their own lives to survive economically inside a ruthless empire.

Trump displaced responsibility for his own acts onto Democrats, an act of demagogic dishonesty and evasion that rivals the "stab in the back" propaganda of World War I German generals, Nazis, and other "nationalists" which blamed "politicians" "defeatists" and "Jews" for Germany's defeat in that war. In fact, the top Field Marshall, Hindenberg, told the government to sue for peace after the U.S. entered the war and Germany was facing imminent military defeat.

Here is what Trump said a few days ago:

 "The Democrats forced that law [sic] on the country! I hate it, I hate to see separation of parents and children!" [1] Trump pretends he is being forced to do something by "law," and further that it is "the Democrats" law. A double lie. Since this cruel tactic of turning migrant children and babies into de facto orphans held in prisons (not "shelters," another lie by the Trump regime, since they are imprisoned there and cannot leave, and their parents are kept in the dark as to their whereabouts) is something that was never done before, it is spurious in the extreme to pretend it is required by law.

He is also lying when he pretends to "hate it." He wouldn't be DOING it if he "hated" it!! Someone get a fire extinguisher to put out the blazing inferno on that guy's pants!

Apparently pleased with the additional outrage he provoked by his original libelous, demagogue smear, he kept it up in the following days, repeating his canard: "The Democrats have to change their law." Now there's a mind-twisting act of displacement of responsibility. Trump is acting as if HE is outraged by what HE is doing, and it is the Democratic Party doing it!!

Like all demagogues, Trump's irrationality has emotional logic for those attracted to him. The hate object, the scapegoat, is blamed for one's own sins. Since Trump is always blameless in all things, and his opponents guilty of all that is wrong in the world, it follows that the policy of Trump and Sessions and ICE to rip children away from their parents as a "deterrent" to "illegal" border crossing is the fault of the Democratic Party.

No matter that there is no basis in fact for his smears. Like Ronald Reagan, he knows that "facts are stupid things" is an effective operating principle for demagogues. Especially when "the" media is muted or silent in rebuttal. His target audience, the racists, xenophobes, nationalists, reactionaries, will hear him and not the feeble response. ("The" media, that is, the corporate propaganda system, hasn't broadcast LOUD Democratic rebuttals that I have heard.)

Trump has conditioned his followers not to believe news reports that contradict his outrageous lies. Such facts are "fake news," as he has repeatedly insisted. (A standard propaganda technique is to repeat and repeat a lie, to get people to believe it. All demagogues do it.)

Adolf Hitler was a believer in the Big Lie. He thought big lies were actually MORE credible than small ones, because the average person tells small lies all the time but not big ones, and assumes that since he or she wouldn't tell a big one, neither would the demagogue. On the other hand, since they themselves tell small ones, small lies are paradoxically less credible than big ones.
Trump however tells all sizes. Medium-sized ones too, for that matter.

Trump's minions, as well as various stone-hearted sadists who are Border Patrol and ICE agents, are carrying out the cruelty with vigor. (Ward Churchill's phrase "little Eichmanns" comes to mind.) Agents snicker at crying children ("All we need is a conductor," one snidely sneered in the presence of distraught young children) and the more openly thuggish GOP politicians are similarly callous. Michael Grimm, who once threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony for asking him a question he didn't like, and who went to prison for tax evasion, which doesn't stop him for running right now for his former seat in the U.S. House representing the reactionary New York City borough of Staten Island, and he's ahead of his primary opponent, said crying babies in U.S. prison camps is no different from babies crying at day care centers after being dropped off by their mothers. [Except, it seems needless to point out, it is only for the day, and the mothers know where their children are, and the children aren't prisoners, and the parents aren't prisoners, and oh what's the point of applying reason to the arguments of these cruel creeps!]

Trump's Grand Inquisitor, the unreconstructed Confederate racist and arch-reactionary Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, continually spews execrable lies and dishonest statements. His parents named him after the arch-traitor Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, a fact "the" media hides by referring to him ONLY as "Jeff," as if his name is Jeffrey. And Beauregard is honor of Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who kicked off the U.S. Civil War or War Between the States by ordering the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. (However, it is claimed that after the war, he advocated for Black civil rights and Black suffrage. But Sessions hates black suffrage and has prosecuted blacks for registering blacks to vote when he was a U.S. Attorney for Alabama and Alabama state attorney general at different times. His victims were acquitted after enduring a legal ordeal, which still had the desired chilling effect on other blacks who might be so bold as to become politically active in Alabama.)

And twin Trump harridans Kellyanne Conway, an indefatigable spewer of bullshit as a television spokeswoman for Trump, and Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of "Homeland Security," which includes ICE and its Border Patrol, have been relentless in their lying, seeming to try and outdo their boss Trump in mendacity. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and flattering the boss is a condition of employment by Trump.) Both inhabit alternate universes from the one we are actually living in. You can do a search for their despicable statements on the scandal of the ripping of children from their parents. I'm not going to reprint all their grotesques crap here.

After weeks of media coverage (actually the "alternative" media started it, and the "mainstream" media tardily picked it up, while still misrepresenting things, watering down the cruel treatment, pretending it is only affecting "illegal immigrants" when in fact asylum seekers, who are NOT "illegal" but are being treated as such by the outlaw Trump regime, which cloaks its crimes against humanity in "law," standing reality on its head, are also having their children forcibly taken or taken by subterfuge.

The best ongoing coverage I'm aware of has been by democracynow.org.

With polls safely showing a two-thirds majority of the public disgusted by the "policy," Democratic politicians have duly noted the direction of the political winds and have gotten involved. To be fair, some did so sooner than others. Democracynow.org has interviews with some. [However 55% of Republicans approve of the vicious "separation" policy, falsely claimed by Trump and his henchmen and women to be required by law, while all but officially announcing the fact that the goal is "deterrence," i.e. make Hispanics fleeing violence stop coming to the U.S. Come here and we'll take your children away from you is the "message" they want to "send."]

Congressman Frank Palone described one example of how the  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which goes by the chillingly apt acronym ICE) and its thuggish arm, the "Border Patrol,"   "separates" children from their parents. The governments' goons snuck into a cell at 3 AM and snatched a child from her father while they slept. Many similar stories have been aired in the past few weeks. There are other such stories. (This one came via WNYC radio in New York City.)
But contrary to the squeals of outrage, cruelty is nothing new as a U.S. practice. It is as old as the nation itself. Furthermore, it cannot be otherwise, as the U.S. is an empire. And empires are based on force, violence, coercion. And the U.S. is an empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery.

That all sounds like rhetoric to most Americans. The facts proving it fill numerous books, so I cannot prove the case in a short essay. Nor should I have to, given the massive amount of documentation that is openly available. People who don't know these very obvious truths by now are either willfully ignorant, hopelessly brainwashed, and/or fanatical nationalists.

1]  "The Democrats forced that law upon our nation. I hate it. I hate to see separation of parents and children. The Democrats can come to us as they actually are in all fairness, we are talking to them, and they can change the whole border security. We need a wall. We need border security. We've got to get rid of catch and release." Trump to reporters at the White House, June 15, 2018. Yes, the fractured syntax is accurate. From CNN and other sources.

Detention center? What detention center? This is just a nice cozy shelter for kids!

Oh stop being such a little crybaby! 

(Republican advice for little brats who come here uninvited.)

Does Secret Police Chief + Vagina = Feminism?

It does if you are a secret policewoman named Gina Haspel.

At least that's one of the cynical propaganda themes that was used to push through her nomination as head of the CIA, the U.S. global Gestapo. (Official title: Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI.)

Haspel was up to her eyeballs in the CIA torture program unleashed after a cabal of the Bush-Cheney regime, Saudi Arabia, and elements of the U.S. secret police apparatus (CIA, FBI, and NSA) with co-conspirators NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani and insatiably greedy billionaire Larry Silverstein blew up three buildings at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2001. But that's another and rather long story.

Haspel was basically the number two CIA person in the torture program, under the fascist fanatic Jose Rodriguez. (If you've ever heard this rabid humanoid rant, you'd see why "fascist fanatic" is the correct description.) She oversaw the destruction of evidence, namely videos of the actual torturing of prisoners. And she ran the CIA torture center in Thailand. (All this is no doubt just the tip of the iceberg of her criminal career.)

In her confirmation hearings, she refused to condemn torture (which would have been hypocritical, absent a true rehabilitation), but promised not to "break the law." Which is completely disingenuous, since the CIA's position is that the torture was legal. So she actually promised NOTHING.

But that's good enough for the imperialist U.S. Senate, which duly confirmed her. The U.S. Congress has always been an accomplice in U.S. crimes. Some "liberal" fakers posture and pose and spout empty rhetoric, but are content to allow the crimes to go on. They could actually make real trouble if they chose to. Senator Ron Wyden is a good example of one of these fakers. He plays along with the "classification" game. A Congressman has immunity for anything he says on the floor of the House or Senate. He could read into the record various "secrets." But he doesn't want to lose his precious classification "clearance." So he's in on the "secret" crimes (no secret to the victims, who are barred by the U.S. media from informing us) but his lips are sealed.

The "feminist" argument for Haspel is particularly cynical, a bit of rhetorical/ideological jui jitsu. Of course a person who works for an organization that is dedicated to oppressing the world's poor, who are majority female, cannot be a feminist. Unless by "feminist" you mean "self-interested woman careerist promoting her own interests."

Oh Happy Day! At last the glass ceiling at the CIA is broken! 

Another milestone in the march to Women's Equality!

 

Donald Trump Is the Most Honest U.S. President, Because He Says What He Thinks, Mostly

Witness his tweets. Is there any doubt they are true expressions of what he actually thinks at the the moment he writes them?

Yes, Trump does lie a lot. So do ALL U.S. presidents! "The" media counts every falsehood from Trump as a lie, but that is not accurate. He actually believes a lot of the false things he says. So those aren't lies. You want to see presidents who lied a lot, look at Johnson, Nixon, Obama, the Bushes. And their lies were even more evil than Trump's. Trump's lies are blatant and ludicrous. Those of the aforementioned were calculated as part of plots to commit evil. Trump tells stupid lies, then sometimes denies he told them, or brags about how he lied! [1]

Now, when I say Trump is the most honest president, some points must be made. I do NOT mean he never lies. And I don't mean he is completely honest. There is no such thing as complete honesty anyway. For one thing, most of our own minds are unconscious. We aren't even honest with ourselves! What I mean is, much of the guff he spews is what he's actually thinking while he's spewing it. Other than not cursing, my bet is there's little self-censorship going on when he tweets. (Note the chronic moaning of his would-be handlers, which "the" media feeds us, about how they can't control his tweeting.)

For those who recoiled in disgust at the title of this essay, understand this: Honesty isn't a virtue, per se. That's a very important point to keep in mind. Adolf Hitler was honest about what he thought about Jews. Saying that is emphatically NOT to give Hitler a compliment! It is merely a statement of fact. Ditto calling Trump (relatively) honest.

His tweets are not those of a master manipulator. A cheap bully whose instincts are purely tactical, is what they show us. His fulminations obviously represent his feelings of the moment. It's hard to see much calculation in them, contrary to the conspiracy-mongering of his many media foes as they "analyze" the tweets for hidden meanings and subtle strategies that aren't there. (In fact, the Blatherariat is constantly overthinking Trump's impulsive and improvisational acts. They're doing it right now, trying to divine a "strategy" in his dealings with North Korea. There IS no strategy. He just grabs opponents by the psyche an yanks them around, like someone grabbing your sleeves and tugging to move you in a simple direction.)

Whether what he says is true or false, there is no question that Trump is FAR more honest than most if not all of his predecessors. In fact, Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon,  Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, and down the line, were manipulative liars, and clearly flat-out con artists in the cases of Obama and Clinton. Trump too is a con man and a liar, but SO obvious about it that he's like a burlesque act of a con man. The fact that he gets over with many people is a testament to the credulity and stupidity of those people. He shouldn't be able to fool anybody.

Trump often ends up exposing himself by blurting out his true thoughts and motives. For example, when he told a TV interviewer that he fired Comey as FBI secret police chief because of the "Russian collusion" investigation.

Even when Trump says true things, the media nomenklatura and the Democratic Party's political elite claim they're false. And what clearly discombobulates them is when he violates the taboo against contradicting U.S. imperialist ideology. Like when he said in response to an interviewer who wanted him to denounce a foreign despot that the U.S. has done some bad things. (You're never supposed to admit that, even though it is glaringly obvious.) Or just now, in the wake of his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, that U.S. war games with South Korea are "very provocative." This set off the Blaterariat and the Dems. And as if a memo was sent to every talking head, they all also objected to the term "war games," insisting they are merely "military exercises." In fact, they include practice nuclear attacks on North Korea, "decapitation" strikes aimed to exterminating the North Korean rulership, and invading the North. Obama conducted such "exercises," and Trump has allowed them too. He actually said it was a waste to send bombers all the way from Guam for these practice runs at annihilating North Korea.

Now, let us use another Nazi analogy to clearly illustrate an existential truth about the morality of lying. Say I was living in Nazi-occupied Europe, and I had hidden some Jews on my property. The Gestapo (or their indigenous police collaborators) knocks on the door and asks if I know the whereabouts of any Jews. Of course I LIE. Here, lying is a GOOD thing. In fact, in this instance, lying is a moral imperative! (Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any positive lies by Trump.)

"Honesty is the Best Policy" is a simplistic bromide fed to children by adults to make them easier to control. (And fed by adults to other adults to gain advantage over the target person.) To dictate to another person, "honesty is the best policy," is to attempt to exercise power and control over that person, pure and simple. Knowing what they really think, and what they have done, while one does not reciprocate, is an exercise in interpersonal domination.

Politicians and secret police types are well aware of this, which is why they themselves always strive NOT to be honest. They want to thwart others having a potential advantage over themselves.

So, I will conclude by saying that unlike U.S. media natterers, I like to go past the superficial events of the moment, the existential ephemera of passing events, and delve into the underlying structures of reality. The daily soap opera drama "the" media and political hacks focus on is like the sea spray from breaking waves, a constant yet ephemeral phenomenon, the obsessive and breathless daily scrutiny of which tells us nothing about the tides, the deep currents, and all the other underlying structural aspects of the oceans themselves.

1]  It must be noted that some of Trump's lies and falsehoods are extremely malign and cause tremendous harm to people- such as his demagogic attacks on immigrants. Hispanic immigrants, that is.

And of course he lied about his intentions regarding taxes, and then shamelessly lied about the actual tax law he and his GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) fellow travelers enacted.