Congratulations to POTUS on the Choice of Former Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as the Nominee for Sec Def!
I don’t personally know Senator Hagel but I have always admired both his political stance and courage. In 2007, Hagel opposed his Republican party and most of the Democratic Senators on their misbegotten choice of another Iraqi Troop surge. He also opposed the conservative wing of his Republican party --- a lame collection of ‘chicken hawks’—who insisted on an increase in the military budget.
Hagel had both the foresight and courage to espouse calls for direct talks with Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.
And to make matters worse, Hagel really caused a cascade of false bravado to burst at the American Enterprise Institute where most of the neo-con ‘chicken hawks’ are nestled in their berths of comfort and solace.
In addition, Hagel committed the ‘no-no’ policy, as I call it. He dared to initiate a dialogue with IRAN!!!
Can you believe that this Vietnam veteran, Chuck Hagel was awarded two purple hearts when he was a soldier’s soldier in 1968.
Can you believe that this Vietnam veteran, Chuck Hagel was awarded two purple hearts when he was a soldier’s soldier in 1968.
That was the time that most conservative Republicans like Cheney, Bush Jr, Rumsfeld, Hadley, Perle, Wolfowitz, Romney were in the process of making CERTAIN that they never would have to serve in Vietnam.
In fact, Cheney avoided the draft 9 times, clearly stating that ‘this was not his kind of war’. In fact, his lovely wife, made certain that she was sufficiently pregnant just in time to get our ‘chicken warrior’ out of combat.
In contrast, a simple man without pretensions went into combat and like most of us who have encountered war and terror, he understood that it was far more important to engage your ‘presumed enemy’, wherever they may be, into a process of negotiations rather than outright fighting. If truth be known, he like Eisenhower, understood the limits of military actions.
So he supports efforts to engage our allies overseas and use more of ‘soft power’ over ‘military might’. And he understands that we have to decrease the size of DOD bloated budget and concentrate not on ‘more’ but ‘better’ fighting forces.
And, oh by the way, he believes in the outmoded concept of ‘BIPARTISANSHIP’. He understands that in order to get any legislative action through a polarized body of cacophony and discordance, one needs to work both the Democrats and Republicans into a unified chorus of words and deeds.
How novel!!
By the way, as a side note, Hagel , happens to espouse all those beliefs that a young novitiate senator from Illinois had proclaimed in 2008 when he ran for the first time as POTUS---Barack Obama.
Well, MR President, you have made a wise and stately choice in a time of turmoil and polarization.
I congratulate you on behalf of all us veterans who are tired of fighting needless wars and come back with missing parts and damaged souls.
This is only a beginning, Mr President.
But it’s a GREAT START!!!
But it’s a GREAT START!!!
Now, you really are acting like the COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF we have been waiting for over thirty years.
Hagel is the first combat veteran to serve as Sec Def!!
Remember Sarge! Treat us with tough love !!!!
Chuck Hagel is an excellent choice for Secretary of Defense.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if any choice is "excellent" but Hagel is one of a kind. I always liked the fact that he never smiled for the public like all other politicians feel they must.
DeleteSteve, I am learning a tremendous amount from your blog. Thank you. However, given your background, I am surprised that I see nothing from you about the impact on the US structure of those who brought the abuses of the Hitler regime into the US, through Operation Paperclip and perhaps other paths. For example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPAHBaQfBs4&feature=youtube_gdata_player . How is this? You have to be aware, are you not? If you are, why do you deal with the window dressing?
ReplyDeleteRichard,
DeleteHave you read "America's Nazi Secret" by John Loftus? It describes how thousands of Nazi war criminals were brought in and used by the CIA, State Department and Department of Justice in the name of "anti-Communism".
John Loftus has made a huge contribution by documenting that the US worked hand-in-hand with former Nazis during the Cold War. Furthermore the US worked with Nazis the world over, not just Germans who participated in war crimes were they members of the National Socialist Party or not.
DeleteHowever Loftus is a zealot, and fails miserably to put these facts into the moral context in which the Americans found themselves in regarding Stalinism.
Before the joint Soviet/German invasion of Poland in 1939 the "Red Scare" painted Bohlshavism in the USSR as the menacing, murderous evil it was. But low and behold as soon as Germany joined with the USSR in invading ONE country, Poland, while the USSR was also invading Finland, the Baltic countries, WITH NO CONDEMNATION FROM ANYONE, all US government propaganda reversed entirely. In keeping with the US's British and French allies the US vilified the Germans and omitted completely all Soviet aggressions until after Germany was in ruins and the Soviets were trying to overthrow the governments of Italy, France, Greece and Turkey.
Yes the Germans which the US worked with to combat communism committed terrible war crimes.
But to did the US and Britain. This was the actual reason for the Nuremberg "Trials," which many jurists like Leone Jawarsky REFUSED to participate in. For example, there is now no historian of the holocaust who believes any more that there were ANY gas chambers in any of the sixteen-odd concentration camps in Germany which Germans falsely claimed existed at the Nuremberg trials. The only remaining camps for which controversy still remains are the five which existed in Poland, which were according to the "evidence" at Nuremberg only a small portion of the entire network.
Here is a more recent version which includes Cheney Rumsfeld Clinton et al.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh7SWnZMPng
I bet Cathy O'Brian has a lot to impart on the Sandy Hook Sniper, on Mood altering Meds all of his life, diagnosed as a child with Autism, higher spectrum: Aspberger's (Rain Man).
Sandy Hook, home of the author of "The Hunger Games", a lily white Norman Rockwell respite, was selected for the DIRTY DEED, to galvanize public opinion.
WE HAVE A CRIMINAL SHADOW GOVERNEMNT WHOSE GOAL IS TO BRING AMERICA DOWN...STARTED LONG BEFORE OBAMA WAS IN DIAPERS.
The goal is NOT THE 2ND AMENDMENT ERADICATION---IT IS THE ENTIRE CONSTITUTION, TO BRING FORTH A WORLD GOVERNMENT.
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
Chuck Hagel,
ReplyDeleteObama didn't pick him...Someone else did: George Herbert Walker Bush
Obama takes his marching orders from Bush.
Here is a forensic psychiatrist analysis of Obama's psyche:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/forensics-profiler-deconstructs-barack-obama/
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDoes everybody take their marching orders from Poppy? Sometimes it looks that way. How about Dr. Pieczenik? He has repeatedly praised Poppy as a fine president, a statesman and a brilliant CIA agent as well! Is this consistent with Poppy also being the biggest, most successful criminal in U.S. history, or with his connections to international child-murdering pedophile networks, or being (in my opinion) the central planner of 9/11, the crowning achievement of his illustrious criminal career?
ReplyDeleteBut yes, it certainly does appear that Obama too is a Bushman. He is just continuing the Bush policies under more cover with different rhetoric to keep his well-meaning but mush-headed liberal base behind him, and of course he is keeping 9/11 under cover and not letting an investigation go forward that would indeed quickly go all the way to Bush, father and son and the whole damned family. We can safely presume he was vetted about this before he was allowed to run for president, and at least he was honest enough to say even during the 2008 campaign that as president he would be "looking forward" rather than spending time and energy on the prosecution of crimes that may have been committed in the Bush administration. He's kept his word on that promise, all right.
Of course, there is always the hope that things are different now that the attempted coup has failed. What attempted coup, you ask? You know, the one that got Petraeus and all those other flag officers sacked. Maybe Obama is trying to steer an independent course in his second term. Maybe Hagel will be a good SecDef and this appointment signals Obama's serious intention to stop listening to the warmonger neocons deal with Iran. Or maybe not.
I've only met Bush Sr. once and didn't think he was anyone's idea of a mastermind. I know scores of people who know him socially as well as a score of others who've worked with him. No one I know says he's any kind of deep thinker or highly dramatic soul.
DeleteI think he's exactly what he appears to be - the mediocre and sleezy scion of an ambitious climbing and grasping father who had a huge ego and strong personality.
George Bush Sr. always just wanted to live up to his father's expectations, and his idiot son did the same.
And we're the ones who have to suffer because only the father projected what he really was while the son and grandson had to project very different images in order to be accepted by the public and that's what made both of them born LIARS.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteGeorge Bush Senior's father, Prescott Bush, ans manager of Brown Brothers Harriman was one of the principal financiers of Adolph Hitler, did you know that? Have you read "The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush" by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin? Or "Family of Secrets" by Russ Baker? There is way, way more to this family than meets the eye. They are without a doubt the biggest crime family in the country, and they have been pretty much running the country for quite some time.
DeleteI'm aware of the Justice Department's action against Union Bank, and it's much exaggerated by Tarpley.
DeleteUnion Bank was only one of many banks and corporations doing business with the German government when the US suddenly switched sides and decided to join the USSR/France/Britain against Germany. Many American companies which had been encouraged to invest with Germany because they had zero unemployment and was the strongest economy anywhere were suddenly hung out to dry.
Another distortion of Tarpley and others is the extent of Union Bank's activities and Prescott Bush's direct involvement.
Union Bank financed a lot of needed trade with Germany, but that wasn't "support" of the Nazi party in any way. Nor was Bush involved in any tracable manner in supporting the Nazi party.
There was a cabal of Wall Street bankers who tried to talk Smedley Butler into a hairbrain scheme to march on Washington like the facists march on Rome, but these bankers were quickly exposed and the whole stupid matter was put to rest and covered up. I don't know that Bush played any role in it, and doubt very much that he would have given that the malfactors involved were bank Presidents, not merely board members like Bush.
On the subject of the Sandy Hook murders, it sure looks like another false flag operation. It isn't clear to me that the kid had anything to do with it. His classmates report that he was very bright and nice, albeit shy. As to the Asberger's, I think I have a touch of it and so do most of my friends. This kid had no history of violent or anti-social behavior. No matter where I look, I can find no eyewitness accounts of anyone claiming to have seen the shooter. There are however real police recordings describing two shooters fleeing the scene. It's likely that the poor kid was just the patsy. The kid's father is a GE vice president and his mother was getting a huge alimony payments (12000 a month). I suspect this may have to do with a pedophile ring.
ReplyDeletehttp://aangirfan.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.conspiracy-cafe.com/apps/videos/videos/view/17440303-emergency-conspiracy-cafe-bunker-to-bunker-broadcast?profile_tab%5Bposter_id%5D=73371079&profile_tab%5Btab_count%5D=455
For the record, as a former intel operator I have to object to the misuse of the term "false flag" as it's commonly now used to describe any event supposedly perpetrated by someone using a surrogate in which the real perpetrator wishes to be unacknowledged.
Delete"False Flag" has always meant to me only one thing - recruiting someone to do something he wouldn't otherwise do by telling him he's working for someone OTHER than who he's really working for.
For example, in the film "Munich" the Israeli agent recruits German and French communists to help him locate Palestinian militants by telling them he's working for "a group of rich Americans who want to help the Palestinians...."
This is what a "false flag" is - fooling someone into believing the ship you're piloting belongs to a different navy than it really does.
It is of course a coincidence that this shooting event happened just at the time when Obama could make an issue out of it, i.e. he could never have called for gun control before the election.
DeleteHowever that doesn't mean this kid who committed this act was anyone's robotic agent.
I prefer to use "Okham's Razor" in this matter and point to the more mundane and very real reasons why this kind of thing happens before reaching for highly speculative interpretations for which there is only circumstance and conjecture.
Here in Austin where I live in the early 1970s the 13 year old son of President Johnson's aid George Christian brought a rifle to the Middle School I live next to and used it to shoot another student.
These things have always happened.
What's different now is violent computer and video games, the militarization of the police, and a host of other similar trends which would lead some kid to use a bushmaster instead of the single shot .22 that George Christian's son brought to Murchison Middle School in Austin Texas.
btw Austin was also the scene of the Charlse Whitman massacre from the University of Texas tower in 1966.
No one here would claim that those act here in Austin were part of the "new world order Bilderberg group, etc...."
Police Fire audio Scanner feed: Sandy Hook School 12-14-12: 3 SHOOTERS: "WE GOT 'EM!!"
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9klblvRFzaI#!
MITMichael: Maybe "False Flag" is the wrong term. All I meant by this was that it seems very possible to me that the murder was committed by others for reasons still unknown, but it was made to look like it was done by a lone nut who killed himself. Dead lone nuts are very convenient that way. Sometimes it seems that the whole history of the United States has been written by dead lone nuts.
DeleteAlex Jones has totally lost it with his paranoia that this event will bring about the confiscation of all firearms after which the "globalists" will overthrow the constitution and civil war will ensue.
DeleteJones is now at a new level of shear lunacy.
If anything gun ownership and support has skyrocketed in the decade since Columbine.
There will be no significant Federal gun control actions.
Alex Jones is a nut, no argument there. And gun sales are continuing to skyrocket even more after Sandy Hook. I hate having all these guns around no matter who has 'em. You can't tell the cops from the gangs anymore anyway. If you want to talk about the Second Amendment, lets really stick with the "original intent of the founders" and allow people to have only muzzle-loading muskets. That and a good billy club ought to be enough for domestic police work, too.
DeleteBut this is not relevant to my point about Sandy Hook, which is that there were no eyewitnesses who say they saw the shooter, there are audio and video recordings of police chasing and arresting people at the scene, yet no mention of this either by the police or any reporters. No questions are being asked and everything is being covered up. We no longer live in an open society. The press just reports what officials say and does not even ask questions. The officials provide an unverifiable story - just as, for example, they provided the unverifiable story (now a Hollywood movie) of how Osama bin Laden was killed and his body fed to the sharks in accordance with hallowed Muslim tradition. Who knows what the motive for this horrible massacre might have been? Who knows what evil and nefarious organization might have been behind it? I say we better stop wringing our hands and investigate. I would start with the father, a hedge fund manager paying his ex wife $25,000 a month in alimony. Same thing with the Aurora massacre, where I have strong suspicious that there were MK Ultra mind control operations involved. I don't think this is just a plague of well-armed lone nuts, and I believe there are very evil powers loose in the land that would do a thing like this, or like 9/11. They rely for their existence on the fact that their existence is too terrifying for most people to contemplate. They live among us in the shadows of our fears.
9/11 was an "inside job," and this kind of thing is a standard practice of foreign policy makers.
DeleteBut there is no corollary to that outside of foreign affairs, which is a field in which the public is always manipulated and deceived for reasons of morale.
"Going postal" is something people have been doing for a very long time. It usually involves a single alienated white male with an "inferiority complex" who's seeking to gain power by a bloody demonstation of violence.
The real motives of these pitiful characters are so obvious, so well documented, that no other more complicated explaination is required.
Where I find exceptions are, once again, in the field of foreign affairs - specifically the false claim that political assassins have been alienated lone nuts.
More specifically, in the Kennedy assassination Lee Oswald was anything BUT a lone nut. Contrary to what the public has been told he possessed highly-marketable skills in languages as well as photography. He was well above average in intelligence, and was held in high esteem by successful people in every city in which he lived. Nothing that the debunkers have claimed about Oswald, including the comments of his own brother, have turned out to be true.
Oswald was a CIA asset used as a patsy just as Osama bin Laden was.
DeleteWhat about Breivik, then? Would you say he was a lone nut or did he have political connections?
What do you know about Michael Vickers?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/12/17/177676/bin-laden-leak-is-referred-to.html
Also: Pickering speaks while Hillary plays Hookey.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_US_LIBYA_ATTACKS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-12-18-21-20-30
Michael Vickers?
DeleteAre we speaking of the same Michael Vickers I knew from the CIA Afghan Task Force AFTER 1985?
If so I'd have to say he's a sinister individual for whom individual human life has little meaning or value.
There was absolutely nothing of value other than sadistic "retribution" for having lost in Vietnam in the CIA/DCIA CASEY escalation of the war in Afghanistan after 1985.
Once Vickers, Devine, and the EXTREMELY SINISTER Avrokotos took charge of the Task Force the war went from a simmering little bloodbath to a raging full scale civil war repleate with routine sexual rape and mutilation of captured Russian soldiers [which Avrokotos and Vickers used to joke about] was well as other massive atrocities by the Afghans which in turn led the Russians to hate and kill anything that moved.
Vickers is Satan.
The way Reality works to awaken those whose only reality is Relativity is to offer them the vacillation of Over vs Under. Every human lacks the ability to see their true self. For self-insight/introspection to happen, humans need a drama. For the individual, such dramas could be something terminal and that is when one could hear the, "Why Me?", to be followed soon by the, "Please God!", resounding even in a vacuum.
ReplyDeleteTo comfort the uncomfortable, even The Divine seemingly has this problem. Much like say, a house, cannot see itself unless seeing its reflection on a calm lake, the Divine needs to see His Self reflected on those humans who have "Made the grade". No, we are not talking about The Hallelujahs for they are merely of Religion & Religiosity, the latter being a very mesmeric Tentacle of The Bookie, we are talking about those who have the courage to face their self and calling a spade a spade. You know, those who have realised that self is the reality, firstly and lastly. How is that so? Because when one is self, then there is no [such a thing as] Other.
This is where we get back on course - offering a seemingly real good and nice guy the job which demands Cruelty & Cunning, Anger & Guilt and not least, The Bad Cop & The Good Cop. C'mon, let's have the other one will ya? This possibility is merely to offer the Illusioned-Delusioned their salivary drippings by none other but Devolution Itself, a seemingly variant to what The Ayahtollah called, The Great Satan. Here, I rest my case, M'Lud.
I think I hear you brother.
DeleteThe world of war, meyhem, terror and malice for reasons of the state is the arena for the drama humans require to find their destinies.
There is a purpose and a creativity at work in what is perceived as conflict.
Something sublime is at work in these dramas, and it yeilds something magnificant - a refined human being.
Furthermore...
DeleteThis is the reason why there will never be direct contact between alien civilizations and human societies.
The simple truth is that if humans actually knew the purposes for which they are on this planet it would make it impossible for the dramas which are necessary here to be played out.
Alien races are all around us, and except for individual contacts [which are often based on deception] they have no choice other than to leave us to our ourselves.
It's laughable for scientists like Hawking to speculate about aliens as though he has any notion of what the purpose of anything is in the universe other than his puny observations.
Refined and enlightened men like Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick gave the world a vision of the progress and meaning of humanity back in the 1960s [a time of great creativity].
DeleteTen years later immature creatures like George Lucas gave us a contrary vision in which the barbarism and tyranny of the human condition was extrapolated to the entire universe.
I think the aliens both pity and dispise people such as Lucas.
Clarke and Kubrick may re-join us someday, somehow, so we might share in their enlightened vision.
MITMicheael - Geez, I didn't have such feelings about Star Wars. I loved it. I thought it inspired a whole generation to fight against the Empire - which is still my full-time occupation. Stanley Kubric is my favorite director ever for movies like "Dr. Strangelove" and "A Clockwork Orange", but "2001" was somehow never my cup of tea.
ReplyDeleteI don't get into investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial contacts, although I have friends who do and maintain that something like a real crash of an alien craft did happen in Roswell. Unlike David Icke I don't trace all the evils of the world back to alien reptilians, although as I say, the resemblance of Queen Elizabeth to a thousand-year-old crocodile, or that of Tony Blair and George Bush (junior and senior) to a nest of snakes lovingly entwined is indeed uncanny.
Star Wars is of course fantasy, a re-invention of Buck Rogers and Saturday afternoon serials.
DeleteLike a lot of current filmmaking it's a comic strip, a morality fable for children.
A lot of fansiful, bad fiction has been written about social ills by positing that similar issues exist on other fictional planets.
The problem with this is that it reflects a real assumption which has no basis - that it is known by scientists how human beings came about, and therefore other civilizations must be similar.
This is of course absurd.
Nothing in science actually addresses how human beings came into being or for what if any purpose.
Nothing in science addresses the meaning of anything, and scientists who ASSUME otherwise are entitled to their ill-considered opinions. However, no scientist that I know of except for the rarest of exceptions such as Clarke has looked to other diciplines in which issues of meaning are addressed.
Or said another way....
DeleteStupid scientists and fiction writers claim that aliens are a reflection of ourselves.
However this cannot be anything but flawed because these people don't understand what we are.
The reason why this is stupid is because only an unexamined life could cling to the scientific view.
Almost any level of reflection or self examination [such as that evidenced by Clarke] would yeild this awareness.
I have no idea of what kinds of aliens there may or may not be or whether they are predatory or benevolent or what, and I question the claims of anybody who who makes such claims on the basis of their alleged level of self-examination or their reading of 1950's science fiction. Personally, my favorite science fiction writer is Philip K. Dick, whose novels are devoted to showing how the whole world we think we are living in can be an illusion.
ReplyDelete