Bone Deep

“You don’t need to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” said Biden in his opening remarks. “The connection between the Israeli and American people is bone deep... I am proud to say that US relations with Israel are deeper and stronger than they have ever been.” —Al Jazeera, reporting on 07.13.2022

 

"Bone deep"? ...as opposed to the connection between the Ukrainian and American people, which is more "skin deep", I'm guessing...?

Yeah, the sonofabitch said our connection to filthy, murdering Israel is "bone deep".

He's actually more or less right, y'know.

14 x 18.5" medium-res color .jpg image, 987kb

Mow The Lawn

So, the other day I'm doomscrolling the news from Gaza, and I stumbled over this 8 year-old Truthout article that somebody dug up and tweeted. The callousness of Washington foreign-policy think tanks — and the Israeli general public — is perversely spectacular:

Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray learned...

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

11x13 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 869kb

Carbon Footprint

Congratulations, USA – another dirty, bloody regime-change proxy war down the crapper.

11x12 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 541kb.

Oooooh, LOOK! The FUTURE!

So, here we are hardly a week into this Shiny New Hope™ and Change™ Era, and we've already pretty much seen what The One and his Donkeycratic cohorts are all about: The Future. They want to move forward, move ahead, don't look back, don't stop thinking about tomorrow (MoveOn just wants to take another swig of Kool-Aid and – move on). They're so much about The Future, in fact, that they want to totally ditch the past – including their enabling of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, their role as accomplices in the destruction of the Constitution via USA PATRIOT, their endorsement of US-backed Israeli atrocities in Palestine.



Do you people – those of you who know who you are – honestly think the Donkeycrats will so much as lift a finger to bring the Bush mob to justice? Arrest Bush? In your goddamn' dreams. President Timberlake has kept Robert Friggin' Gates on as Secretary Of War, f'cripesake – not to mention that The One has also already gotten his hands bloody in Afghanistan and Pakistan this week. Does this look like the kind of guy who's going to raise so much as a murmur of objection to the crimes of the Bush Regime, anymore than he's spoken barely a whisper about US-financed Israeli war crimes in Gaza? Wake the hell up, US Left.

To bring Bush and the Gang to justice would require the Donkeycrats to admit to their own extensive complicity in crimes against the Constitution, international law, and humanity in general, crimes the Bush Regime could not have carried out without help from the Donkeycrats – kinda like the spot they found themselves in about ten years ago this month. To have impeached Bubba Clinton for his complete "rap sheet", aside from all that blowjob nonsense – murderous sanctions against Iraq, the continuous bombing of Iraq, the "Lewinsky Bombing" of Afghanistan and the Sudan, the two and a half months' continuous saturation bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia – would have required the Donkeycrats to 'fess up to their having allowed it with barely a peep of protest.

In other words, don't hold your breath.

Medium-res jpg image, 872k

Nerobama

So, I'm on the street shooting these demos where people are demanding that Emperor-Elect Timberlake "say something" about the Israeli rape of Gaza, as if with enough pressure – if you call sign-waving and delivering white roses "pressure" – he'll suddenly have a Eureka Moment and go on TV and "do the right thing".



Now, I often like to joke around with my friends about how most Americans' long-term memories don't go back past the last episode of "Desperate Housewives", but lately it seems to be the dead-assed truth, and that includes The Movement™. Anyone who thinks that Obama actually has substantially different ideas about the situation that he's just waiting to express until he's officially El Presidente has obviously already forgotten his notorious wet, sloppy blowjob of a speech he delivered to last year's AIPAC Convention shortly after becoming the presumptive (spit) Donkeycratic Party nominee for Maximum Leader.

So, everybody, just knock it off about getting Barack Obombirana to "speak up" about the slaughter of Gaza. The guy's already said everything he needed to say about Gaza in that lickspittle AIPAC speech. Check it, gang...

Medium-res jpg image, 720k

Obama's Big Bus!

At least up until the last "election" or two, you used to hear a lot – especially from the Donkeycrats – about the proverbial "Big Tent", ostensibly used to symbolize the Party's diverse constituencies, but actually just a cheesy way for your Party to pander to segments of the voting population it normally wouldn't give the time of day to.

Once again though, huge props to the Obama Cult for taking this concept a bold step further. Amazing, how quick and efficient he was, too.



Hear that, UFPJ? Hear that, Code Pink? He already wants to expand the war into Afghanistan? He's roped in your votes, he's got what he needed from you, now your ass is under the bus!

Environmentalists? Didn't he shift his position on offshore oil drilling? D'ohh, under you go. Looking like some awesome parties at the Inauguration, though.

Gays? Lesbians? Let's not even go there. He doesn't even want you to be able to marry. He's even invited that born-again creep, Rick Warren, the Purpose-Driven Gay Basher, to speak at his friggin' Inauguration! Why the hell did you all go for him so much? Doesn't matter, you're gone anyway. Crunch. Ouch.

I could go on, but you can see where I'm headed. The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round...

Medium-res jpg image, 650k

"Birth Pangs of a New Middle East"

Is it just me, or did Secretary Of Snake Condolee-ee-ee-eezza Rice make one of her weirdest statements ever last weekend -- even weirder than that NBC "Today" interview where she said "freedom is on the march" about half a dozen times? Oh, and I love the part where she says that "We're going through a very violent time." "WE"? What do you mean "we", white woman?



All in all, though, quite a bout of birth pangs, there; shame it couldn't have been a more quiet, serene and peaceful birthing experience, like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's baby.

Medium-res jpg image, 744k

Nuclear Threat

I saw on the morning news the footage of the first successful synthesis of uranium by the Iranians. I saw a scientist holding up this little capsule of radioactive gas with this theatrically triumphant attitude. As I heard the pundits clucking on TV, I reminded myself, "OK, Iran's finally gone nuclear, but who's the real nuclear threat in the Middle East?" Every time I asked myself this, I kept coming up with the same answer:



BIG HINT: it begins with an "I", ends with an "L", and has "S-R-A-E" in the middle. Has anyone else noticed how the US Press and the State are shitting themselves over Iran finally managing to produce some crummy-assed smidgen of enriched uranium, while failing to point out that Israel has enough nukes to make a ring of craters around itself?

Let's take a calm, close look, here. On the one hand, we have a nation that's just now reached the Pinky And The Brain stage of nuclear development; on the other, a nation with at least 200 functional nuclear weapons of various types -- most of which were supplied by the USA -- on standby, ready to light the place up. Those of us out here who aren't profoundly retarded can see who the real nuclear threat is here, and would really appreciate it if the US Media would quit jerking us around.

Medium-res jpg image, 676k

What Has Ariel Sharon Learned from the Holocaust?

The State of Israel -- headed at the time by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, architect of the 1982 brutalization of Lebanon as Israeli Defense Minister and quite possibly with the largest overall girth of any world leader -- was going on another one of its recent periodic ass-stomping parties in Palestine, this time directed at the towns of Ramallah and Jenin. It was starting to look more and more like the Nazis moving into Warsaw every day, to the point where the comparison was far more accurate than your average overblown "Godwin Rule" Nazi analogy rant on Usenet. While comparisons to Warsaw 1940 and 1960's South Africa are today made by everybody and their cat -- including former US President Jimmy Carter -- in early '02, with the big Crusade still going on in Afghanistan, to dare compare Israeli State behavior in Ramallah and Jenin to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw was taking a huge-ass chance not only with the rightist/zionist factions among Jewish America, but with the then-highly intimidated US Left as well.



A lot of folks here will also remember this piece in the context of the infamous Danish cartoon brouhaha because this fracas spawned the now-legendary Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by Hamshahri, the major Iranian daily paper out of Teheran. As you recall, the contest called on cartoonists around the world to submit Holocaust-themed cartoons as a challenge to people who claim to support free speech to put their money where their mouths are. Iranian president Ahmadinejad, himself a Holocaust denier, was expecting to see cartoons denying the Holocaust; what he got instead was an outpouring of cartoons critical of US/Israeli policy on Palestine, cartoons which compared the Israeli aggression in Palestine to the Holocaust — cartoons which, by their very nature, assumed not denial but acknowledgement of the historical fact and reality of the Holocaust. As I recall, there was a grand total of one — count ‘em, one — cartoon actually denying the Holocaust in the entire competition.

I, along with five other Americans, were participants in this contest and exhibition, to which I submitted the cartoon you see above, which basically asked what Prime Minister Sharon and others of a generation of Israeli leadership old enough to have lived through the Holocaust, exactly what they’d leared from it; my own answer was that they’d learned precisely the wrong things, as both history and recent events had shown they’d become that which they themselves hated generations ago.

Needless to say, I caught a shitstorm of howling criticism from not only the reactionary right-wing Zionist factions, but the reactionary US right wing, in the form of interviews I gave on a couple of right-wing talk-radio programs whose hosts bitched and fumed at me for being “anti-Semetic”, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the cartoon was not a slag on Judaism or Jews but a direct, pointed criticism of Israeli state behavior in Palestine. Talk about your great truth beginning as blasphemy; here we are three years later, and everybody from the UN to former US President Jimmy Carter is comparing Israel’s behavior in Palestine to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and to South Africa’s apartheid era.

It was tough going for a while, there, but man, it sure is nice to be right.

High-res jpg image, 968k