The Gang That Couldn't Bomb Straight

I'm not talking about the mad bomber whose improvised explosive devices have luckily killed nobody since he (or they) started planting them willy-nilly over the weekend in dumpsters and on fun-run routes and around tourist spots in the Greater Metropolitan Area.

I'm talking about the inept bombers of the United States military establishment. Over the same weekend, American armed forces "mistakenly" killed and wounded at least a hundred Syrian and Afghan soldiers in two separate oopsies. But these bombers could not possibly be described as terrorists. They're the good guys. They have protected, state-sanctioned status.

Now that law enforcement officials have identified the suspected New Jersey/New York bomber as a naturalized American citizen of Afghan descent, it has finally become safe and politically correct for us to use the "terrorist" word to describe him.

Upon hearing that the now-arrested suspect's name is Ahman Kahn Rahami and not Jim-Bob Fluke, politicians and pundits are jostling for prime camera position.

According to the New York Times, the Rahami family of Elizabeth, New Jersey are notorious operators of a restaurant ironically called First American Fried Chicken. It never closes. Customers are loud eaters. And of course, they urinate in neighbors' driveways. And every time the cops are called, the Rahamis scream discrimination. And some of them have even fled back to Afghanistan!

So, you see, American citizens, the freelance bomb-planters are upset and went on their rampage because they are bad neighbors in America, not because America invaded their home country 15 years ago and has no intention of ever leaving.

The smaller headline in today's Times smarmily describes the human carnage unleashed by American warplanes this way: "Accidental Bombing in Syria Creates New Dilemma for U.S."

As usual, when another illegal and undeclared war goes bad, it's framed around "the White House struggling to put together a coherent strategy in a multi-sided conflict":

The errant bombing, for which the administration apologized to Mr. Assad, also gave both the Russians and the Syrian government a propaganda bonanza: Russia suggested it was a result of an American reluctance to share intelligence, and the Assad government said, contrary to all other evidence, that the United States was trying to protect the Islamic State.

The US insists it wants to send humanitarian assistance to the people it is killing, but the convenient scapegoat for everything from hacked emails to the rise of Donald Trump - nasty old Russia - isn't letting them. The American airstrike on anti-Isis Syrian troops and the mass violent deaths it caused have "weakened efforts to control violence,"  another Times subhead paradoxically complained.

It's nearly impossible to locate the tiny Times article on the most recent of many "errant" American strikes in Afghanistan, but it's still there: 

 A spokesman for the American-led coalition, Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, confirmed only that “we conducted an airstrike against individuals firing on, and posing a threat to, our Afghan partners in Tirin Kot on 18 September.” His statement continued: “We don’t have any further information on who those individuals might have been or why they were attacking A.N.D.S.F. forces.” The initials refer to Afghan security forces, including the military and the police. “U.S., coalition and Afghan forces have the right to self-defense, and in this case were responding to an immediate threat.”

Translation: it's the fog of war, Citizens-Consumers. Since we invaded their country, we have to defend ourselves by killing global neighbors we don't have the time or the inclination to identify. It's a threat whenever we say it's a threat. From way up in the air, all those people look alike to us.

The corporate media, meanwhile, are showing some refreshing new priorities today. It turns out that it takes a domestic bomb-thrower to bump another bomb-thrower named Trump off the top of the front page.

The serious people sit back and wonder why "they" hate us for our freedoms, and want to blow things up. The word "blowback" is rarely mentioned in polite media company.

Instead, the Tweeters and talking heads argue back and forth about who uttered those careless bomb and terror words first - was it Trump or was it Clinton? Our pathological state of permanent war and mass surveillance is not a fit topic for discussion and debate in Neoliberal Horserace 2016.

Before the manhunt and ensuing arrest of Rahami, for example, NBC framed the story around Trump's irresponsible knee-jerk reaction and Clinton's more passive-aggressive blather.

The presidential candidates remained true to form in their reactions to the explosion in New York City on Saturday night, with Donald Trump sounding alarms and Hillary Clinton offering caution.
Trump, the Republican nominee, was set to take the stage in Colorado Springs just as unconfirmed reports of an explosion in downtown Manhattan started spreading over Twitter.
After waiting on his plane for about 13 minutes, he took the stage and reported what no news outlets or law enforcement had yet: that a "bomb" went off in New York City.
"Just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York, and nobody knows exactly what's going on, but boy, we are living in a time," Trump said. Exactly how Trump learned of the incident is yet to be determined.

While Clinton, the Democratic nominee, appeared to criticize Trump for immediately calling the incident a bombing, she initially referred to it the same way.
"I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey and the attack in Minnesota," she said.

Asked later to respond to Trump's calling the explosion a bombing, Clinton told NBC News that it's important to wait until jumping to conclusions.
"I think it's important to know the facts about any incident like this," she said. "I think it's always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions, because we are just in the beginning stages of trying to determine what happened."
On Sunday morning, however, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo referred to the explosions as bombs, as well, saying: "Whoever placed these bombs we will find and they will be brought to justice, period. And they will be punished."

Later Sunday, Clinton put out a statement on the "apparent terrorist attacks" in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

President Obama, meanwhile, chose to simply deny that the dozens of people who were injured and traumatized by the Homeland blasts should be feeling afraid. Because freelance terror never wins, and state-sanctioned winners never quit.

"We're going to continue to enlist tech companies, community and religious leaders to push back on extremist content online and all messages of hate," he said. "We all have a role to play as citizens."

As former "defense" secretary Robert Gates warns, Trump may be "irredeemable," but Hillary needs to get even more hawkish than she already is:

“ (She must) address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment, to demonstrate her willingness to stake out one or more positions on national security at odds with her party’s conventional wisdom, and to speak beyond generalities about how she would deal with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East — and international trade. Whether and how she addresses these issues will, I believe, affect how many people vote — including me.”

I'm scared, all right, but not of the things that our best and brightest leaders and candidates and pundits instruct us to be scared of.

I'm scared that the United States seems to be gearing up for World War III.

Homegrown Hate, Global Chaos

Although the official narrative has Omar Mateen, the Orlando mass shooter, acting out of Isis-instigated terrorism, there's mounting evidence that religious extremism was more of an excuse for him than an inspiration. This guy wanted to create as much mayhem as inhumanly possible, and one way to ensure that he got the undivided attention he craved was to calmly call 911 to tell the media-political complex exactly what it wanted to hear.

The hawkish neocon players of the ruling establishment don't want a homegrown hate crime on steroids. They want a terrorist attack from afar, the better to give them an excuse to drop more bombs, wage more wars, spy on more innocent citizens, manufacture even more of the weapons that the liberals among them claim to abhor every time there's another "tragedy."

The neoliberal players of the ruling establishment forge ahead with their manufactured identitarian presidential campaign in the Age of the Tweeted Insult. They want to pit gays against Muslims against Mexicans against Republicans against Democrats against Trump against Obama and Clinton. They want us to forget all about the lousy economy and the class war of the feral rich against the 99%, the crumbling roads and schools and bridges, the wage stagnation, the rising death rate from suicides and drugs and untreated diseases, the child poverty, the hunger, the despair.

They don't seem to want to talk much about reports of Mateen being a closeted gay or bisexual man. They don't discuss the reality that right-wing religious fundamentalism abides within more than one belief system. Had Mateen tried all his life to "pray away the gay," to no avail? Did he try to overcome his sexual identity by donning a macho uniform and wearing NYPD regalia during his selfie poses? When nothing worked to change who he was, did he instead decide to shoot away the gay? 

  No matter. Fifty people, including Mateen, are dead and several more are maimed for life. But let's not waste any more time -- there's a nonstop presidential campaign on! So let's turn on the TV and vicariously revel in a bunch of millionaires (and an alleged billionaire) hurling invective at one another.

Trump: (breathing heavily and stumbling over someone else's TelePromptered words and sounding more like a cartoon villain every day) Since Obama won't use the words "radical Islam," then it just naturally follows that he supports terrorism. I know stuff. It's all part of a plot. America is so weak. We have to keep Muslims from other countries out. But nobody is more solid with the gays than I am. And Obama hates me more bigly than he hates the terrorists. I scare him more than Isis. Wahhhh.

Obama: (the centerpiece of a Deep State tableau vivant of the financialized plutonomy, the surveillance state, the trillion-dollar war machine and justice-for-some, he is showing some rare anger at Trump's ad hominem attacks against his own personal patriotism.) Let's not get bogged down in the semantics of dangerous cartoon characters. His words don't matter as much as my deeds. Hundreds of bombings and drones and and unlimited wars against global terror matter. America is not only strong, it is exceptional. We protect our people. Rah, rah. Oh, and we love everybody. We don't spy on Muslims unless we're caught spying on Muslims like that time in New York City a few short years ago. But look over there, it's Trump!

Hillary: (reading off a TelePrompter and nodding with grim disgusted satisfaction at frequent applause-ready intervals) Yeah! I'll go Obama one better, though. With me, it's words and deeds. I'm not afraid to say Radical Islam. I'm both a neocon and a neoliberal. So don't ever forget that you're not only electing a Pragmatic Progressive who can get 'things' done, you're also electing a Commander in Chief. Military Maxi-Me. Only I can bring America back to the good old days of Nine-Twelve, that great shining disaster-capitalism moment when we used the deaths of 3,000 people as an excuse to kill millions more and make defense contractors and oil companies and bankers and consolidated media propagandists richer beyond their wildest dreams. But let's 'do' gun control as a wedge issue anyway. Oh, and we love the gays more than Trump pretends to love the gays. And we welcome Muslims and war refugees, too: the rare few who can survive our sadistic, draconian, two-year-long vetting process, that is.  

Since one of this week's favorite parlor games is comparing Omar Mateen to other Great Monsters in American history, my own nomination for his pathological twin would be George Zimmerman. Both, wannabe cops and gun fetishists from the Sunshine State. Both racists. Both perpetrators of domestic violence. Both also probably victims of parental and peer abuse. Both with huge boulders on their shoulders.

Mateen is dead. Zimmerman is still alive, still armed, still causing trouble, still abusive, and as far as I know, he graces no FBI terrorism watch list. He should.

  Because he is still one scary sociopath, who only has to snap his trigger-happy fingers to get all the media attention he wants. He's achieved minor celebrity status. Every time he's beaten up or threatened a woman or, most recently, auctioned off the same gun he used to murder Trayvon Martin, he gets headlines.

He's not done yet.

Both Zimmerman and Mateen likely got their initial investigatory passes because they were both quasi-law enforcement types; they knew the cop lingo, the cop culture. They were deemed harmless, nasty, good ole redneck boys.

Guns are biological appendages to these types of men. Therefore, they're in dire need of emergency therapeutic amputations. Perhaps Congress could appropriate a ton of money to pay huge cash premiums or guaranteed incomes to people who voluntarily turn in their weapons of mass destruction. The relinquishers would then be placed on a list preventing them from using their bounty to purchase more weaponry. Such a program would save lives and might even stimulate the moribund economy at the same time.

Just one day before the Orlando massacre, a disturbed man walked into a ShopRite close to where I live and calmly slashed the throat of a complete stranger as he browsed in the produce section. He then blended right in with the other Saturday morning shoppers. The store was placed on lockdown while police hunted for the killer, who not having an assault rifle, was unable to cause any further human damage before he was arrested.

People with assault rifles can kill a whole bunch of human beings all at the same time. People armed with box-cutters are a lot more limited when acting out their deranged fantasies.

The failure of American politicians to ban assault weapons is tied directly to the fact that the United States is the largest arms manufacturer and dealer and exporter on the face of the earth. The same politicians who cry that the "wrong people" are getting hold of weapons don't bat an eye when it comes to selling billions of dollars' worth directly to such brutal, terrorist-enabling governments as Saudi Arabia.  

As Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent, the fact that the Orlando shooting is raising the global profile of Isis plays right into its propaganda script.  Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is willing to directly confront the underlying ideology of the group. Our leaders aren't willing to admit that Saudi Arabia is the funder and enabler of Islamic State extremism. To do so would be to cut off billions in profits for themselves. To do so would force them to plead guilty to their own complicit role and gruesome partnership with the very enemies they are creating.

Yes, Trump is a dangerous demagogue. But where were Obama and Clinton, asks Cockburn, when their good xenophobic pal David Cameron hurled similar treacherous anti-immigrant invective against the leftist Jeremy Corbyn?

Gun control talk is cheap, given how regularly it gets squelched by the symphony of big money and the chorus of pathocratic greed.