Date: Sunday, December 31, 2006

Dateline: Beirut, Lebanon

There is an oil slick in the water and it’s forbidden to swim. The government that destroyed the infrastructure of this country should be charged with war crimes.

In Jerusalem the tourists are hard to come buy and maybe that is related to orthodox Jews in the city adopting a new fashion statement. The old look for men was black suits and those dumb looking black hats with the broad brims. Apparently that hat look started in Poland or Germany (what ever country your listening to) and male Jewish citizens were required to wear them. Recalling concentration days, Jewish men would sew bits of colored cloth and metal to their prison dress.

Segueing back to Jerusalem, the new fashion is fur. Rags to riches? Where do they put the fur? Mostly on their hats but you will see bits of fur below the belt and fox tails riding a pair of black trousers that could be leather. Mink, racoon, fox, what have you The most impressive hat I saw looked like a huge fur donut resting on the hat’s rim while the top of the hat peeked out the top. And like Davy Crockett their were other hats with designer marks of dead fury animals The most expensive fur was sable from the antelope of the same name. Up to 2,000 was highest quote, probably for the donut. Sable makes the perfect paintbrush and is probably on the endangered species list. What kind of sick mentality is this and does it spill over?

Ask the old war criminal Henry Kissinger, he’ll tell you he deserved the Noble Peace Prize while counseling Nixon, Johnson and both Bushes to war on. Kissinger’s bloody trail leads from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos to Africa, and Chile in South America. Now he’s the godfather of the Jewish fascist Neocons.

It was the disgraced Canadian newspaper tycoon Conrad Black who, with Kissinger sitting on his board of directors, described his voice as sounding ‘like the Marx brothers imitating Kaiser Wilhelm’. I saw Kissinger on a late night TV talk show in the 1980s and he was completely in his cups, but like an artful dodger he slurred a bunch of nonsense words together and just escaped making a fool of himself. For me his voice sounded like a bassy fog horn with gravel in the funnel.

In sociology class at the university we discussed why the Jewish prisoners in concentration camps in World War II would go about the confine grounds picking up bits of cloth and metal if there was any about. The tailor was sewing up medals so they could emulate German officers.

The Bush administration is flush with fascist Jews who call themselves neocons. I think they are trying to establish an historical record that is already fictional. The so called ‘intellectual progenitor’ of Jewish neocons was Frederick Kagan who was born in 1933 and studied classic and historical wars at Yale University. In 1997 he established a neocon ‘Project for a New American Century’ with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as reported ‘signatories ’ to the project. It’s public objective was to create ‘a Reaganite policy of military strength and foreign clarity.’ Foreign clarity? That’s pretty obscure but pitching the greater Jewish Empire and Armageddon might alienate god fearing folk.

With the Bush administration taking over in 2000, the Christian fascist Cheney became vice president and Wolfowitz was working as an assistant to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. Together with other fascist Jews in the Pentagon, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, plans for invading Iraq were being drawn up before the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers. For his part, Feith came up with fabricated ‘Alternative Analysis’ linking the Iraq regime to bin Laden’s militant organization, Al-Qaeda. If Feith had a mission it was for the greater good of Israel. Bush and Cheney must have known his information was false but they used it anyway to beat the war drums. Another Jewish neocon was White House speech writer David Frum who came up with the ‘axis of evil’ slogan. He might as well have been writing about his bosses.

Meanwhile the neocons, lead by journalist William Kristol, jumped on 9/11 as justification for their own obsessions. Wolfowitz claimed that Iraq oil would pay for the war but after nearly bankrupting the county with weapons procurement and never seeing any oil he resigned and was quicky appointed president of the World Bank. Go figure. Perle has always been a war monger and reminds me why former U.S. president Harry Truman wrote in his diaries that Jews were as under underhanded as Hitler and Stalin. Other than that, Harry is famous for being from Missouri and nuking Japan in the 20th Century.

What’s not odd about neocons is their total arrogance. When a plan goes wrong they blame someone else like the Bush administration. And what does Bush do? He asks them for another plan. Richard Perle doesn’t blame himself for promoting the wars in the Middle East, he blames the Bush administration for bungling his great plans. He probably blames the Pentagon for forcing his resignation over a conflict of interest. Then there are the neocon sons of Donald Kagan, Robert and Frederick. I don’t think either of these guys could carry Daniel Ellsberg’s briefcase. Ellsberg’s the fellow who served in Vietnam and later released the Pentagon Papers.

The Nixon administration went after him like he was a yellow cake salesman. According to rumors leaked to the press by the White House, Ellsberg was a homosexual and a wife beater. When each accusation was disproved, the dirty tricks man, Charles Colson, would come up with another one. To my mind Ellsberg is one of the great unsung heros of the 20th Century. He risked everything, his marriage, his career, his life to expose the government’s treachery about the folly of war in Vietnam.

I don’t have a picture of Robert Kagan but he is 48 and the one who nailed the coffin on Saddam Hussein in an article written during the Clinton presidency. Frederick is 39 and chubby with the looks of a nerd who plays computer war games and misses his toy soldiers. He’s the guy who came up with the 2006 serge program in Iraq and Bush bought it. When the war has been going on for a disastrous seven years common sense suggests an exit but Frederick thinks twenty thousand more troops will turn the tide. I doubt it.

At the end of the month they hung Saddam Hussein. It was disgusting, just like the American government. Let’s hope 2007 is better than 2006. More later, P.G.

Date: Sunday, April 15, 2007

Dateline: Valencia, Spain

Sunny and warm but the sand on the beach is to fine for a laptop. Maybe it can be bottled and sent to Iraq for gas tank liner. News that columnist Molly Ivins had died of cancer on January 31st saddened me, her passing was a great loss for journalism. Molly went to highschool in Texas with George Bush the younger and she had a reputation for driving the Texas legislature up the wall. She was also the writer who came up with the hole that George Bush was digging for himself, the hole he’s still digging. She was one of the few writers who made me laugh out loud when I read her. In one of her last columns, and a testament to her great wit, her lead sentence was ‘The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck.’ Bless her.

Still the beat goes on and if anyone thinks the Bush administration is suffering from the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the conviction of Lewis Libby, and other glaring revelations of corruption, think again. Bush is still digging the hole. In February he issued an executive order requiring all federal agencies to have a political overseer. Naturally these overseers will be right-wing republicans in the mold of a Paul Bremer or a John Bolton and in charge of mismanagement. Bremer as you may recall, destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq by disbanding the army and the Baath party. In Russia they called these overseers commissars and I don’t see any difference now between what President Vladimir Putin is doing there and what Bush is doing in the U.S. I don’t believe either of them plan to relinquish power in 2008. They both want to be dictators and they are. Look at what Putin is up to, like Bush, he is creating an autocracy repressing his parliament, the media, subverting the constitution, and waging a war on terror. I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin, like Bush, uses ‘signing statements.’ These statements say that the president can ‘ignore any portion of a new law with which he disagrees.’ Tell me that this isn’t the dictator’s new clothes.

Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Dateline: Amman, Jordan

Amman is not my favorite city but it is safer than Baghdad. I was here in the 1970s and it was like a Wild West town, shacks going up filled with Japanese and American products, washing machines, refrigerators, television sets, all sorts of appliances. It's less primitive now but native women still make spitting gestures at Western tourists. Other than gathering information and viewing antiquities there's not much to do, afternoons are passed smoking seesha in a hookah, sipping tea, and reading newspapers. Evenings include meals in the hotel, a visit to the bar, and television in the room which is comfortable for a three star with 1960s furniture. Oh well, CNN and Larry King was on the air and Larry was celebrating 50s years in the broadcasting business. Each evening for a week he had been interviewing guests who had previously been on his talk show. Nelson Mandela had been on yesterday, tonight was Richard Nixon and I was astonished. The interview was from 1990 and the old criminal sounded like he was still running for office. Yes, here he was patting himself on the back, blowing his horn, and taking credit for bring peace and prosperity to the world. Any questions about his shady past were brushed aside and you know what, even though he was long dead he was still lying.

Do you know why Baghdad looks like an Hieronymus Bosh painting? Look at one. That's why I won't be flying into Baghdad on this trip. They even blew up an Iraqi Parliament cafeteria in the Green Zone. Five security checks and the suicide bomber still got passed them. Must have been carrying a Bible.

The surge goes on but why not call it an escalation? Is surge a Hebrew word? Oh hell, it's not the first surge in Iraq, there was 'one of 20,000 troops in early 2004, a similar one in the fall of 2005, and one a bit smaller in the summer of 2006.' The quote is from columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. You would think the Bush administration might have learned something but no, they are simply gun ho dumb and blunder on blindly. The carnage continues, the number of Iraqis killed is conservatively put at 150,000, the number of wounded is 16 for each fatality according to a recent report on the economic cost of the Iraq war. More than 1.7 million Iraqis have fled the country. More than 3,000 U.S. troops have been killed. A United Nations report claims that 47,000 U.S. troops have been wounded. It goes on to report more than two million Iraqis are planning to leave the country and that in 2006 34,452 Iraqi citizens were killed. This year an Iraqi aid group, the Committee for the Support of Victims, claimed that three million women have been left without men because of the war. Many of those women are widows and many men have fled the country but that's a disturbing figure if it is true, like genocide. Then there is Dick Cheney comparing Muslims to Hitler and Stalin. Who does he think he is?

Another matter I wonder about, are body bags now called transport tubes or is that phrase a sadistic joke? Given the American government's obsession with secrecy, the phrase was probably dreamed up by Karl Rove.