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In an apparent attempt to display how much they care about children, US officials have urged Israel to use "smaller bombs" to kill the Palestinians trapped in Gaza Hamas bad guys. Why use 1,000 and 2,000-lb bombs on one Hamas leader when so many of the thousands of human bodies being destroyed are so little, so innocent and so defenseless?
The use of tot-sized bombs is among the "concrete suggestions" in Secretary of State Antony Blinken's bag of "humanitarian" tricks. Itsy- bitsy bombs will, they seem to think, put a kinder, gentler face on the genocide that has so far killed an estimated 10,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
The use of two 2,000-lb bombs on a refugee camp near Gaza City was such a waste of weaponry, the usual anonymous US officials dished to the New York Times:
"American military officials say that the smaller bombs are much better suited to the dense urban environments of Gaza. But Israel has over the years built up stocks of larger bombs, intended mostly to target hardened Hezbollah military positions in Lebanon.
The United States is now trying to send more of the smaller bombs to Israel, said the senior military official. If the United States can get those smaller munitions to Israel, American officials hope Israel will use them to mitigate the risk to civilians."
"Trying to send" is an implicit warning to the small but increasing number of congress-critters who are demanding a ceasefire, while the more pro-Israel bipartisan majority are wasting time by bickering over whether to bundle military aid for Israel and Ukraine in one mega-war package. Unless these politicians can all come together, Israel will be forced to use its larger bombs. And then they won't be able to hide all those unsightly craters from the prying eyes of that pesky antiwar crowd.
Meanwhile, the State Department, as required by law, notified Congress that Israel had purchased a huge arsenal of assault rifles directly from the US manufacturers of the weapons. The US is now pretending to demand that these assault weapons be reserved for the Israeli military and police, and that they not get into the hands of settlers to drive Palestinians away from their West Bank homes.
Given that Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvyr had already ordered 10,000 rifles to be distributed to Israeli civilians to aid in the government's genocide, the concern-trolling by the White House and State Department is a pathetic joke, given that the malign purpose of the Weapons sale was publicly broadcast a full month ago by Ben-Gvyr:
"We will turn the world upside down so that towns are protected. I have given instructions for massively arming the civilian security teams to provide solutions for towns and cities, and so as not to leave towns unprotected,”
Back on the home front, Joe Biden finally traveled to Maine to concern-troll the latest mass shooting by an assault rifle-armed and mentally disturbed member of the United States military. Biden's repeated pleas for domestic gun control legislation are falling exceedingly flat, given that the US is by far the biggest arms dealer the world has ever known. And that Biden had bragged in his Oval Office speech about the boon to Wall Street and the weapons industry that his two wars provide.
As far as official concern for the children goes, let's just say it's as fake over here as it is over there. Here, we should consider ourselves lucky that for now anyway, most of us live under a de facto policy of eugenics, or Social Darwinism.
Since Biden officially declared the Covid public health emergency to be over last spring, more than two million American children have been kicked off their Medicaid health care coverage. That's on top of the millions of American families with children getting their emergency SNAP (food aid) benefits slashed while grocery prices keep surging higher every week.
In a few weeks, officials said, a minimum of three million American children will be uninsured. It's the highest rate of uninsured children in this country in many decades, and it's only expected to get worse.
It's one more reason for us to keep filling our streets with protest and outrage. All of us, all over this world, are in this together. Cruelty is only a matter of degree. There is so much suffering, and so little time
You can almost see the droplets flying like a fleet of Predator Drones in a line straight from his joystick of a scolding finger, right down to all those "complicit" people in his target audience. He doesn't call his media empire Higher Ground Productions for nothing, after all. His empire even owns and controls the Pod Save America show where he offered his remarks to his hosts, both of whom worked in his White House.
From flattery of his forum's attendees as the "future heroes" whose explicit assignment from Obama was to put a more "humanitarian" face on capitalism, Obama was forced by events to also make a quick, self-serving pivot to gaslighting mode. From Politico:
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he said in an excerpted interview with Pod Save America released Saturday.
Reflecting on his presidency, Obama posed the question, “Well, was there something else I could have done?”
He could have answered his own question by acknowledging what he had in fact done during his eight years as president. While paying lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, Obama did not admit his own direct role in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. He didn't admit that he'd actually found inspiration and justification for his own drone assassination program from a group of Israeli lawyers who had preceded the full-scale genocide in Gaza by targeted assassinations of Hamas members - and whatever civilians were in the vicinity at the time.
This targeted killing program, which got underway in the 90s in Israel in response to a wave of suicide bombings by Hamas, was roundly criticized by US officials at the time.
Then, of course, came the 9/11 attacks. It wasn't long before the War on Terror was proclaimed by the Bush administration, and killing anyone, at any time for any reason, became the de facto US policy. This especially held true for Muslims in so-called "tribal areas" and US-occupied war zones.
By the time Obama took office, targeted killings were the norm. Gone were the antiwar protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There was little to no backlash from the public, even when the New York Times (with full White House approval) revealed the gruesome extent of the "Disposition Matrix" - Obama's own project of piecemeal genocide by drone. All Muslim men in the prime of life were deemed to be "enemy combatants."
At a 2012 security conference in El Paso, Texas, Roel Elkabetz, a brigadier-general for the Israel Defense Forces, bragged to his US counterparts that "We've learned lots from Gaza...it's a great laboratory!"
Eric Holder, Obama's attorney general, went on to actually plagiarize the Israeli lawyers who had first laid out the case for episocic drone and bomb attacks on Palestinians. One of these Israeli lawyers, as The Intercept reported in 2018, later became a professor of human rights and humanitarian law at Harvard University. Unlike Obama, this particular lawyer acknowledged her own direct role in having gotten the genocide ball rolling all those decades ago.
Amos Barshad wrote in that article that Eric Holder, lifted verbatim from Israel the extra-legal rationale for what is the most infamous of all Obama's drone killings:
The memo directly quotes the ILD’s argument in the PCATI (Palestine) case. “Although arrest, investigation and trial ‘might actually be particularly practical under the conditions of belligerent occupation, in which the army controls the area in which the operation takes place,’” the memo reads, “such alternatives ‘are not means which can always be used,’ either because they are impossible or because they involve a great risk to the lives of soldiers.” A U.S. drone killed al-Awlaki in September 2011 in Yemen.
For Obama to now chide his audience to talk to people they don't agree with -because otherwise you are just sloganeering and ignoring nuance - is cynical and hypocritical. He certainly never conversed with Al-Awlaki, or even with Al-Awlaki's parents when they pleaded in vain for a meeting with him to try to dissuade him from his execution order. He certainly didn't talk to the teenage son of Al-Awlaki before one of his drones r killed the boy and some of his friends as they were innocently eating pizza.
To the extent that Obama has acknowledged his role as lord high executioner of the United States, he glosses over it with the usual "higher ground" rhetoric to excuse all manner of crimes, both his own and those of others in his global social, political and economic cohort.
Just as he now lectures the world on their alleged "complicity" in war and violence, he's also lectured the thousands of his own drone victims, actually trying to make them responsible for their own deaths. This grotesque passage in his "Promised Land" memoir particularly stands out:
I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead."
It's a variation of the old Pontius Pilate excuse. Having disclaimed responsibility for murder, Obama doesn't even feel the need to wash his hands of murder on a much more epic scale. He merely flicks the guilt away at everybody else.
Maybe Caroline Kennedy can give him another Profile in Courage award. Maybe the Nobel committee can give him another peace prize. Better yet, maybe the Hollywood that he so adores can give him an Oscar for best performance by a political actor iin the horror-fantasy genre. He also probably deserves the Most Valuable Player award in the world series of conflagration. He does, after all, have a very mean curveball. He pitches so fast and so loose that whenever his foul balls hit somebody in the head, they never even see it coming. And that is their own fault. They are complicit just for existing.
Joe Biden wasn't kidding when he bragged in that shambolic Oval Office speech that bankrolling the twin slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza in one mega-appropriation would be a great investment for America.
Dark Brandon knew whereof he spoke. Weapons manufacturers like General Dynamics and Raytheon are already posting huge profits since Israel declared war on two million imprisoned Palestinians (duly demoted from human being status to terrorists or sub-human shields for Hamas for purposes of brainwashing the public).
As if that gruesome windfall isn't bad enough, the likelihood that the wealthy investors in mass death will have to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains will be practically nil, if newly-crowned House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) gets his way.
That's because the House Rules Committee just introduced legislation requiring that the US's $14 billion aid package to Israel, helping to finance the genocide of Gazans, will be offset by $14 billion in cuts to the IRS.
Not only would investigations and prosecutions of wealthy tax evaders be brought to an effective screeching halt, the cuts would also do away with the free digital tax filing program for regular people. Internet filers would actually have to pay a fee for the privilege of underwriting both the military-industrial complex and the wealthy tax cheats.
The Republicans' rationale seems to be that we have to fight the Palestinian families over there by punishing the powerless families over here. What more apt day is it than Halloween for us to remind ourselves that capitalism is a zombie that must keep replicating itself by varying its diet. Too much is never enough for the ruling class monsters. They were created without any sense of repletion. They are never full. The more that they eat, the hungrier they get. That especially goes for funding the forever-wars.
The GOP's bill would, of course, have to pass in the Senate, and then require Biden's signature. It's not the punishment of the working class factor that endangers this noxious piece of racist, genocidal, class war legislation, however. It's yhat the extra billions that Biden is demanding for Ukraine war funding is not included. So it's probably already dead on arrival in its current form. Or should I say undead on arrival. We all know that any legislative monster worth its salt (and blood-spatter) will undergo the good old sausage-making treatment in the secret congressional abattoir.
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Instead of shambling around and consuming stuff in order to numb ourselves, regular people are waking up. We're not only taking another long-delayed stand against cruelty and war, we're also going out on strike. And we're winning.
"And then, above all, there is the new arrival - the thinking that does not shy away from the horror of the world, the darkness, but looks it straight in the face, and thus passes over into a different kingdom, which is not the kingdom of darkness." -- Henri Lefebvre.
If you're worried about the two million Palestinians starving to death in Gaza as bombs rain down on their heads, maybe you shouldn't be.
Because to hear first lady Jill Biden tell it, our most pressing concern should be that our ruling capitalist predators get enough comfort food to eat. Stuffing their faces with gourmet treats posing as plain country fare eases their stress and strain. Their need for sustenance should prove to us mere mortals that these demi-gods are, in fact, as human as you and me. The poor beleaguered things not only are tasked with waging, marketing and profiting from ongoing multiple wars, they're also busily plotting the total global conflagrations of the future. And it takes a lot of caloric fat for the fat cats to survive and thrive for purposes of your security.
So there was no possible way, genocide in Palestine notwithstanding, that the Biden administration would ever have cancelled the state gala for the prime minister of Australia, which is now the main US base of operations for their hoped-for war with China.
"Nurturing our partnerships and relationships with our allies is critically important, especially in these tumultuous times," Jill Biden euphemistically explained as her rationale for going ahead with the dinner. "Food is comforting, reassuring and healing, and we hope that this dinner provides a little of that as well."
Given that the 300 honored guests at the state dinner included the bloodthirsty likes of Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin III and Victoria Nuland, one can only imagine the gusto with which they gnawed into such delicacies as spareribs slathered with gobs of sarsparilla sauce.
Jill Biden came off sounding a lot like the clueless hostess in the classic Katherine Mansfield short story, "The Garden Party." The matriarch scoffs at her conscience-stricken daughter's plea to cancel the festivities because a man had just suffered a fatal accident in the slum neighborhood located just outside the gates of their fancy estate. Putting the feelings of her poor, mourning neighbors ahead of her wealthy guests enjoying her food, her flower arrangements, and her hired musicians would have been just too "extravagant."
"You are being very absurd, Laura," she said coldly. "People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. And it's not very sympathetic to spoil everyone's enjoyment as you're doing now."
But to show that for her own part, Jill Biden is not completely insensitive to what either the Palestinians or the growing number of critics of her husband's embrace of genocide might think, she did cancel the hired entertainment part - dance music by the B-52s. It might have looked unseemly for the gentry and proxy genocidaires to be seen rocking and rolling to a band sharing a name with an aircraft that's been used for decades to drop US bombs all over the world, including in the Middle East to this very day.
Instead, Jill opted for the soothing jingoistic sounds of military bands from the Army, Air Force and Marines. The corporate media dutifully downplayed the party as "sedate" and "low-key" and even family-centered, given that the Bidens' grandchildren were there.
(Even as they were playing their appropriate tunes, an Army reservist in Maine - trained as a state-sanctioned weapons instructor - was shooting up a bowling alley full of kids with his own instrument of choice: the iconic AR-15. Any upcoming sympathy visit by Joe Biden to yet another grieving community might be a little more awkward than usual, given his recent glib remark that dead Palestinian children are inevitable - because war. Also, there's the inconvenience of his own son being under criminal indictment for an illegal gun purchase.)
But enough of all this angst and unpleasantness. Let's get back to Jill Biden's mission of comforting the comfortable. A few days before the state dinner, she was dining by candlelight with fashion industry donors at former Vogue editor Anna Wintour's multimillion-dollar townhouse in New York City's Greenwich Village.
She told the group that, given these "fraught times" she wouldn't trust anybody but Joe Biden to be sitting in the Situation Room for another four years. And why wouldn't she, given that the Situation Room is really a 5000-square foot a mansion within a mansion?
With its recent $50 million renovation, the Biden sitting room is many rooms, including many nooks and crannies and multiple conference rooms and even so-called "breakout rooms." The padded walls are adorned with multiple high-def video screens especially designed for the comfort of aging eyes. Even the presidential seals for the podiums have been supersized and specified to be larger than a human head. The massive main conference table is crafted from the finest fine-grained mahogany. imported from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Far East with a military base. The chairs for the armchair warriors are crafted from the finest leather, flayed from the finest American cows.
But where would comfort food and furniture be without fashion? Jill Biden is also all about the couture to take wealthy minds off all that global "tumult" and other unpleasantness. She told her fashionista donors that couture is "not only the clothes we pull out of our closets each morning, they are statements of our identity. They're our armor."
There is no word yet about "who" Jill will wear as body armor when (in our imagination) she brings baskets full of state dinner leftovers to the UN trucks parked at the Egypt-Palestine border.. It would be a happy ending to ur story. It would be just like the young girl in "The Garden Party" bringing her basket of party food to the bereaved family of the accident victim. She thought she could just leave the offering at the cottage door. But then those sly underclass victims of capitalistic predation actually make her view the dead body.
It's nurturing comfort food for the hoi polloi, on those rare gala occasions when the comfortable actually get afflicted for a change.
Who would ever dream of canceling such a tumultuous event?
What took European invaders close to 400 years to accomplish in the Americas, the State of Israel hopes to accomplish in less than a quarter of that time. I am talking, of course, about the State of Israel's pivot from its protracted ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the outright genocide of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza.
Just as the Puritans self-righteously justified their own wars against native populations by pointing to their own persecution at the hands of the British, and later, by the often-violent reaction of Indians against the settler-colonists, so too do the Zionists of Israel justify their treatment of native populations by pointing to their own long history of persecution in Europe, which culminated with the Holocaust. As long as the perpetrators can gloss over their racist white supremacy with the shield of perpetual victimhood, they feel free to do plenty of victimizing of their own. If you criticize their actions, you are labeled an anti-Semite. You might even have a Wall Street job offer rescinded if you're an Ivy League student. (Which might not be a bad thing, in the long run. Maybe these elite college kids can now oot for a teaching job in an underserved public school!)
Joe Biden, on his quick campaign stop in Israel, wasted no time in embracing both Binyamin Netanyahu and Bibi's predictable denial of responsibility for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, which has claimed the lives of at least 500 people. The US president glibly explained his belief that Hamas ("the other team") was responsible by saying that "his" defense department had already told him so. This is the same dude who had enthusiastically embraced the debunked war propaganda of decapitated Israeli babies.
It's all about the solidarity among the settler-colonialists of the world. Both the United States and Israel consider themselves to be exceptional nations, among God's chosen ones. They do pre-emptive war with impunity.
Why else would the US military, in which Biden puts so much demented faith and trust, name a whole series of its lethal weapons and hardware after the native populations it had finally conquered in the late 19th century?
Here's just a partial list of what the perpetual US war machine has used to maim and kill untold millions of people, the majority of whom have been non-white in the ludicrously-named post World War II "Pax Americana" --
Apache attack helicopter, Tomahawk cruise missile, a whole series of helicopters bearing such tribal names as Cayuga, Huron, and Iroquois, not to mention the high-tech spy aircraft called Kiowa, Ute and Mohawk. And who can forget that the mission to murder Osama Bin Laden was named after the great Indian warrior against US occupation - Geronimo?
Such naming is a way to continue denigrating American Indians while justifying their own modern wars of aggression. It speaks to a kind of distorted genetic memory of all those innocent settler-folk being scalped by the "savages" who had the effrontery to resent their invaders. Not for nothing do supporters of the genocide in Palestine attempt to dehumanize the actual victims by calling thenm "savages" and "human animals." It's all too familiar.
And now, with most of the civilized world aghast and protesting in the streets at the blatant and even downright gleeful genocide of Palestinians, the US has effectively joined Israel in being viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world. The US itself is still an apartheid state in all but name, discriminating against and punishing its own citizens based upon their race and class and gender - and lately, even their independent thought - despite all the sanctimonious laws that it has on the books. Jim Crow is still alive and well. Just witness the gross expansion of the US prison system, the largest in the world, with more Black people now incarcerated than there were slaves prior to the Civil War. This statistic is largely the result of then-Senator Biden's crime bills, passed with bipartisan support in the 90s.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 2023, the Biden administration is such an unabashed champion of Palestinian genocide, albeit with the usual ass-covering platitudes about humanitarian concerns. It is somewhat gratifying - or worrisome, as far as the New York Times is concerned - that even timorous "progressive" politicians are just now beginning to make the tiniest possible demands of Biden to broker a ceasefire. It was only a week ago that the Democratic Party was so unified. They voted en masse against ex-House Speaker McCarthy. Most of them already endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, for cryin out loud!
But even the reliably pro-Israel Times isn't quite as gung-ho about Zionist revenge as it was in the immediate aftermath of the atrocious slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas. Perhaps it has something to do both with the backlash from readers in the comments sections, and from the public at large. Not when "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" has been expanded so disproportionately. Like Biden, Netanyahu's political viability was also in question prior to the allegedly surprise attack by Hamas.
Biden's gruesome theatrical embrace on Wednesday of this brutal right-wing leader of Israel was intended to recast him as a courageous wartime statesman rather than as a bumbling old man with low domestic approval ratings. However, any additional support or kudos that he gets from his fellow Neocons in both war parties will be diluted by the two other hawkish xenophobic presidential candidates in the mix. - Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There are already indications that his political stunt has backfired.
This creates a much bigger opening for the lone antiwar candidate, Cornel West. He may not win - actually allowed to win - the election, or even get ballot access. But at least the corporate media are now being forced to give him a regular platform. No matter if it's just an attempt to co-opt him in their corporate fold or boost their ratings among the younger demographic.
Because despite its own ham-handed efforts, the Censorship-Industrial Complex cannot control the narrative. The grotesque reality speaks for itself.
Listening closely to this interview, you find that Clinton initially only singles out the elected MAGA Republicans of Congress as the insane actors in dire need of her mental cleansing. But then she swiftly pivots to the mass of powerless voters as also worthy of treatment in her asylum. These voters, according to Clinton, were attracted to Trump by virtue of such pre-existing maladies as xenophobia, misogyny and racism. The false hope he gave to many of them, even previous Obama voters, for relief of their pre-existing economic precarity - has no cure in her neoliberal playbook. Other than shock therapy, maybe.
The fact that she herself had countered Trump's fake populist appeal by lecturing to the voters in 2016, rather than meeting them where they lived, both geographically and existentially, seems not to have dawned upon her.
This glaring omission naturally segues to the next concerned query by Amampour : what about those awful third party challengers? Aren't you afraid? She thus hastily absolves Hillary from examining or reprogramming her own brain, to ignore that her own lack of personal charm and political skills were prime reasons for her defeat by Trump. It was, of course, also the fault of the Green Party's Jill Stein.
Hillary imagines, therefore, that votes will also be "stolen" from Joe Biden - by some of the very same deplorables who lack the intellectual heft to dive deep into all his alleged accomplishments.
But just in case that kind of shaming won't work on the hordes of thick-headed lumpen, she ends the segment in hoping they still have enough of a vestigial fear center left in their rotting brains to at least stagger to the polls in favor of her own her preferred master-cult.
