The Hagee-Farrakhan Paradox

In yet another of those great contradictions that plague this rancid and rotting empire Barack Obama has been brutalized over favorable statements made about his historic candidacy by the infamous Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan who has been made into that most unholy of all monsters – an Anti-Semite (also known as one who makes comments critical of Israeli aggression). During Tuesday’s latest fucking disgrace of a Democratic party ‘debate’ beltway elitist hack Tim Russert went straight for Obama’s throat over Farrakhan that was straight out of the neocon attack manual and part of an obvious clandestine Clinton operation to mount a dirty smear campaign of whispers and allegations linking the insurgent candidate not only to radical Islam but also to those who have been deemed by the elitists and agents of The Lobby as Jew haters. Leave it to the always outstanding Glenn Greenwald to bring out the obvious hypocrisy that Manchurian McCain faces no similar criticism for his effusive praise and loving acceptance of the support of a man whose ideology if taken to it's logical conclusion would seem to make him a real Jew hater far dangerous than Farrakhan. Radical cleric John Hagee of the Rapture death cult who openly advocates an event that would incinerate more Jews than even Hitler would have been capable of had he stayed in business until a ripe old retirement age.

Greenwald’s pieces are always spot on when it comes to getting at the real meat of the issues and Thursday’s “Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable” was a masterpiece in calling out this sleazy attempt to judge Obama under different rules than those deemed to be acceptable to the neocons are. I will excerpt a few bits of this here but recommend checking out the entire thing:

One of this week's hysterical press scandals was that Minister Louis Farrakhan praised Barack Obama's candidacy even though Obama had previously denounced numerous Farrakhan remarks and the Obama campaign did nothing to seek out the Farrakhan praise. Nonetheless, Tim Russert demanded that Obama jump through multiple hoops to prove that he has no connection to -- and, in fact, "rejects" -- the ideas espoused by Farrakhan deemed to be radical and hateful.

Yesterday, though, the equally fringe, radical and hateful (at least) Rev. John Hagee -- a white evangelical who is the pastor of a sprawling "mega-church" in Texas -- enthusiastically endorsed John McCain. Did McCain have to jump through the same hoops which Russert and others set up for Obama and "denounce" Hagee's extremism and "reject" his support? No; quite the opposite. McCain said he was "very honored" to receive this endorsement and, when asked about some of Hagee's more twisted views, responded: "all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee's support."

McCain's sainted supporter, Joe Lieberman, last year spoke to Hagee's group and lavished him with such obsequious praise that Lieberman actually compared Hagee, favorably, to Moses. Why is Louis Farrakhan deemed by our political establishment to be so radioactive as to not be fit for good company -- black candidates are required to repudiate his support even when they haven't sought it and denounce his views even when they've never advocated anything close to those views -- but John Hagee is a perfectly acceptable figure whom mainstream GOP politicians are free to court without any consequences or media objections?

Here is just a small sampling of the belief system of this welcomed McCain supporter:

* All Muslims are programmed to kill and we can thus never negotiate with any of them. From an NPR interview Hagee gave to Terry Gross in 2006:

AND -

Hagee believes that "the president's support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state," which "will play a pivotal role in the second coming." These views are not unrelated to Hagee's support for McCain. Quite the contrary; Hagee cited McCain's so-called "pro-Israel views," his belligerence towards Iran, and his social conservatism as reasons for the endorsement. And in critical contrast to Obama and Farrakhan, McCain actually seems to share some of Hagee's more twisted views, as evidenced by McCain's joyful singing about dropping bombs on Iran.

The GOP has long been given a pass on courting the most warped and twisted religious figures around. George Bush spoke regularly with Pat Robertson -- never once forced to "denounce" or "reject" him. In 2006, Rev. Hagee had a private meeting with uber-White House neocon (and convicted criminal) Elliot Abrams, who just happens to run Middle East policy in the Bush administration, and afterwards, Hagee gushed that he and Abrams (like he and Lieberman) shared similar views towards the Middle East: "we felt we were on the right track."

Watching the media's treatment of Farrakhan and Hagee, is it possible to imagine a more transparent, and grotesque, double standard? In the framework of the Russert-led establishment press, white evangelical Christians are, by definition, entitled to great respect no matter how radical, extreme and hateful their professed views are. These are, after all, religious Christians -- People of Faith -- and, as such, it is wrong, even bigoted, to suggest that they should be repudiated. There is nothing ever radical, hateful or dangerous about the views of white evangelical Christians like Hagee.

When it comes to flaming bags of pus preaching hatred towards Muslims (and Catholics) – which the McCain campaign is going to carpet bombing fearful Americans with as though he were dumping napalm on women and children back in Nam – John Hagee has no equal. His radical Christian Zionist militant group Christians United For Israel although only two years old has proven to be reliable boots on the ground shock troops for extremist right wing Israelis and their dual loyalist agents that are deeply embedded in the American media, military and government. Hagee who is also the author of books like Jerusalem Countdown that builds on the cultist Left Behind series of pulp fiction Armageddon books read by millions (and could have been written by Israeli intelligence itself so vitriolic are they to Muslims, liberals and the United Nations) caught the eye of the nuke Iran war freaks who have always preyed on rube bible thumpers and is now being used as a shill for the PNAC agenda of world dominance. His audacious pep rallies for a holy war to end all wars are orgies of the same sort of iconography and demagoguery that Leni Riefenstahl immortalized on film in Triumph Of The Will and the glazed eyes and thousand yard stares (see video here) of the hateful lemming CUFI followers and those of the German people are so similar that they send a chill up my spine. McCain’s object of everlasting man love Joe Lieberman is a Hagee favorite and has even gone so far as to compare the hatemongering minister to the fucking Moses himself. It is no small coincidence that CUFI came into existence at precisely the same time that the drive for nuking Iran was gathering momentum.

McCain of course being the straight shooter that he has thrown in with the same agents of intolerance that he once denounced before he found Jesus after that Karl Rove induced mugging in South Carolina back in 2000. McCain is a pathological war freak and wants to exact his brutal revenge on any proxy target of the Viet Cong so throwing in with the agents of extremist Israeli ideology like Lieberman and a flaming lunatic who wants to influence U.S. foreign policy to bring about the beloved Rapture and therefore the immolation of all Jews who don’t convert to Christianity makes perfect sense. The real issue though is why none of this gets any play in the mainstream media while Obama is practically crucified on national television just because Louis Farrakhan has mentioned him in a favorable manner. In another recent piece Greenwald gets at this strange concept of a media that constantly obscures any semblance of any sort of negative commentary on the role of Israel in world politics which is an absurdity that goes largely unnoticed here in our flag swaddled, god kissed lemming colony:

On virtually every issue concerning Israel, views that are held by substantial minorities or even majorities of Israelis themselves are deemed prohibited in the U.S., ones that inevitably subject the advocate to accusations of animus towards Israel or even anti-Semitism. There are very few issues in mainstream American political discourse with a narrower range of mandated orthodoxies than those which relate to Israel.

The pressure is being placed on Saint Barack now to seek atonement and he is already being forced to pander and suck up to the small but influential Jewish voting bloc that has for all intents and purposes no real reason to throw in with Obama given the win-win situation that a Clinton vs. McCain choice in November would represent to ensuring that U.S. foreign policy is largely dictated by the neocon fanatics like the aforementioned Elliot Abrams. Now Abrams is a real piece of work and his influence as a big gun operating out of Dick Cheney's shop is the son in law of the shrillest of the Middle Eastern conflagration pimps Norman Podhoretz who just had his manifesto with the subtle title of World War IV published much to the delight of adherents to the neoconservative philosophy. Abrams actually wrote his own little strident manifesto that arguably should have disqualified him from holding any serious government position that had anything to do with setting American policy in regards to the Middle East even if his status as a pardoned Iran-Contra felon didn't. Abrams' book that is entitled Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America exhibits that the man has an ideology that borders on zealotry when it comes to Israel and even goes so far as to make an argument for advocating that Jews enforce the practice of eugenics by not participating in any sort of intermarriage that could produce children who are not pure - sounds very much like the ideas of a guy named Hitler was once shilling on racial purity. Check out this link to a New York Observer story written by Phillip Weiss on Abrams.

Now what is really problematic and a question that is even more taboo than the Farrakhan vs Hagee paradox is the presence of a guy like Abrams in Dick Cheney's office which has been acting as a defacto shadow government for the past seven years. While many of the other very dangerous neocons like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith have been forced out in disgrace over their Iraq debacle Abrams is still figuring prominently and provides a valuable link to the dark bowels of the Reagan administraton which is a long story and I am not even going to attempt to get into it here because it takes us in a completely different direction and can't be addressed without looking into REX84, Continuity of Government (COG) and Ollie North's gun and drug running so I will leave that for a different time. All the trains run through Abrams' office and Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article The Redirection speaks of this in some detail:

The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

So while I began this posting to be a look at the Hagee-Farrakhan paradox it really leads into so much more and the media's pouncing on one while ignoring the other speaks of something that is much larger than just simple bullying of corporate news organizations by well organized agents of the Israel Lobby and their Christian Zioinist winged monkeys and it runs deep within our most powerful institutions. It is just impossible to ignore the influence that neocons like Abrams and many others exert and the access to the most important national security secrets that such zealots of not only questionable loyalty but morality enjoy with an astonishing lack of oversight. It is only when placing the different standards that Barack Obama and John McCain are held to by the pocket media kingmakers in a much larger context that it all begins to make sense.

It all tacks towards a one sided foreign policy of skullduggery, heavily abetted by moles like the ones referred to in this great series on Sibel Edmonds that ran in the London Times on selling U.S. nuclear secrets to Pakistan via Turkey and Israel. The moles and other inside operatives are bribed, blackmailed and then utilized to set up false fronts to infiltrate and gather intel that can then be sold on the black market. This is the story that NO media outlet in the U.S. will touch with a fifty foot pole and it's easy to see why, this is volcanic stuff that could set up tectonic shifts in U.S. foreign policy. Edmonds has been under gag order on this after coming across it while acting as an FBI translator after 9/11 and has been trying desperately to get the story out despite every legal roadblock being thrown up in her path by the establishment. At first that it appeared that her story was about funding for the attacks but now it has apparently uncovered a gigantic network of neocons and it wouldn’t be too much of a reach to think that some of those sold secrets may have included codes, NORAD procedures or even the legendary PROMIS software that all could have facilitated the attacks. This is TREASON at the highest levels of the government and nobody wants to touch it including the Vichy Democrats who are likely also involved, this thing is rotten throughout.

Check these out if you haven't already: For Sale: The West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets , FBI Denies File Exposing Nuclear Secrets Theft and Tip Off Thwarted Nuclear Spy Ring Probe. This last one is particularly notable because of the outing of Valerie Plame's nuclear counterespionage front Brewster Jennings years before the Karl Rove-Scooter Libby-Bob Novak operation that it became so famous for which could potentially be a main reason for the vehement propaganda to discredit Joe Wilson and Plame, the breadcrumbs lead back to this secret network that is and has been operating inside the government dating back to before the Bush-Cheney junta seized power illegitimately by rigging Florida in 2000 and throwing the election into a stacked Supreme Court. The silence of the American media on any of this is deafening and to my knowledge the only real mention that it has received was in a Philip Giraldi column published a couple of weeks ago in the Dallas Morning News.

Edmonds has already hinted that there is more to come and considering the government's collusion with the media on the ongoing stonewalling and silence over the AIPAC espionage trial against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman that could blow the lid off something so huge that it is beyond comprehension when it comes to illegal surveillance, bartering of state secrets and systemic corrpution of a level never before seen in this country.

Everything is connected and if and when any serious digging ever occurs we are all going to find that it is a snakepit without a bottom.

All The 9/11 Pimp’s Neocons

The presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani epitomizes every misery of the Bush era Republican party that is now spontaneously combusting on the big stage for all to see. The intellectual bankruptcy and moral failures of modern ‘conservatism’ have reached the stage of terminal rot and the air is thick with desperation as the GOP tries to emerge intact from the now disastrous Karl Rove era. The symbiotic relationship with the most extreme elements of the Religious Right is coming unraveled, the libertarians are crying bloody murder and the looters are being exposed as the thieves that they always have been. The Republican debates have been an ugly carnival of perversion with a bunch of anal retentive, rich white guys trying to one up each other on how best to torture, shred the constitution and drag the country further down the dark rabbit hole of regression that increasingly resembles a bottomless pit.

The only two candidates with any sort of a legitimate chance at the nomination are Rudy and Fred Thompson aka ‘The New Reagan’, a mush mouthed oaf who specializes in the same sort of ‘Morning in America’ horseshit that was used to lead this country so badly astray in 1980 and whose mass appeal to the rubes can’t be easily dismissed. Thompson however is sleepwalking through it all and you get the impression that his candidacy is more the result of the war pigs at the fascist nest of snakes that is the American Enterprise Institute's desire to have another malleable tool in the White House than any sincere desire by the great white dope. The minute that his fuck bunny trophy wife stops haranguing him the big lug will likely mail it in and return to his comfortable life as a millionaire lobbyist and character actor so he is really just a bit player in all of this. Rudy is the one who is by far the most dangerous for he is a text book example of the sort of personality examined by Bob Altemeyer in his study The Authoritarians and more recently by John Dean in his book Conservatives Without Conscience.

According to a recent Newsweek piece by Michael Hirsh entitled Would You Buy A Used Hawk From This Man?, Giuliani has stacked his foreign policy team with several neocons of the most virulent type including the granddaddy of them all Norman Podhoretz. Along with the grand old man, also advising Rudy are the virulent racist Daniel Pipes, who once advocated collective punishment in the finest tradition of Lidice by suggesting the razing entire Palestinian villages, and his crony in the neo-McCarthyist Campus Watch goon patrol that targets free speech on America’s campuses, Martin Kramer. Make no mistake though, it’s Podhoretz who brings the real clout to ‘Mr. 9/11’s’ team.Revered by many as the driving force behind the neoconservative ideology, ‘Poddy’ has now found a new host after doing everything but actually blowing George W. Bush to get him to blow Iran to kingdom come. The launching of a ‘preemptive’ attack on Iran is a crusade to which he has on numerous occasions actually admitted praying for.

Here is a small sample from the Newsweek piece:

Podhoretz is in favor of bombing Iran because of the country's unwillingness to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. He also believes America is engaged in a "world war" with "Islamofascism" and that Giuliani is the only man who can win it. "I decided to join Giuliani's team because his view of the war—what I call World War IV—is very close to my own," Podhoretz tells NEWSWEEK. (World War III, in his view, was the cold war.) "And also because he has the qualities of a wartime leader, including a fighting spirit and a determination to win."

And another helping of some more vintage Podhoretz courtesy of Think Progress:

If we bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray that we will we’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced look like a lovefest.

By the way, there is no such fucking thing as “Islamofascism,” a think tank distilled bit of folderol that just sounds good for the haters and the rubes. In actuality the two main components are diametrically opposed, which anyone who can think critically recognizes right away. The “Islamo” referred to is based on a rejection of modern western civilization and all of it’s perceived evils and impurities, while fascism is very capitalistic in nature and the perfect exemplification of the corporate state to the extent that in 1934 Fortune Magazine featured a cover story and a fawning tribute to Benito Mussolini himself.

But I digress…

Much has been made over Rudy’s having been dissed by radical cleric James Dobson as well as movement guru Richard Viguerie for his failure to toe the theocratic line on suppressing women’s privacy rights, and this is being seen by many as a death blow to his presidential ambitions. Underestimating the American Il Duce is a very serious mistake now that he has apparently decided that his easiest path to the throne will come courtesy of the neocon lunatics along with his bread and butter exploitation of 9/11. Those who would prematurely write off ‘Mr. 9/11’ due to Dobson’s snit are making a tragic error – especially if they include Democratic strategists whose coddling of AIPAC is already responsible for a hell of a blind spot. Rudy’s throwing in with the likes of Podhoretz and the crazies only ensures that the most irrational of all will be jumping aboard the Giuliani campaign as though it were the Rapture Express itself.

The extremist ideology of Podhoretz appeals to a much more dangerous group than the so called ‘values voters’. His maniacal zeal for bombing Iran is a bridge to the Armageddonites who will goosestep to the polls in droves at the mere thought of the potential end of days on the ballot. With nutty Norm helping to dictate Rudy’s foreign policy that plays to the extremely militant death cult affiliated with Pastor John Hagee and his ass kicking Christian Zionist organization CUFI (Christians United for Israel) who have been fired up with lies that bombing Iran is a precursor for the return of Jesus Christ. The Giuliani campaign is already a formidable force, but with Podhoretz onboard Rudy will pull that portion of the vote no matter how he stands on the other divisive social issues and Dobson will have no choice but to swallow his pride and get with Rudy's program.

The combination of a lower than expected voter turnout due to widespread anger with Democrats over their failure to deliver on their November 2006 mandate to end the war and hold the Bush administration criminals accountable, along with a reenergized Republican base with a lynch mob mentality, could be a boon for Rudy and the neocons and the worst of all possible worlds for the rest of the planet.