Man Overboard! (to coin a phrase)

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Kevin Reed reports at the World Socialist Web Site:
The President’s response encapsulates the contempt of the entire ruling elite for the conditions of sailors and other military men and women in the war against Iran. For personnel who have spent more than 250 consecutive days at sea—and amid multiple reported suicide attempts—Trump makes clear that the health and lives of American soldiers are expendable.

…and the Donster also actually said this – out loud – to an event at a police academy in New Jersey. And if you’ve seen the same war I’ve been watching since March, y’all know fersure that Trump really has jumped off the deck.

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Baby, Baby, Baby, You're Out Of Drones

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I didn’t even bother to contain my glee as I read the news of US and Israeli stocks of missiles and drones dwindling to rock-bottom levels as the US and Israel pissed it away on decoys, empty buildings and other bum targets in Iran this past March and April.

Still, I didn’t think the US had lost quite that much. I was genuinely surprised – and delighted – to see the front page of the Washington Times the other day. One third gone, no active production lines running, no organized plans to fund more production… oh, holy shit, I can’t pretend I’m not enjoying this. I’m no expert on logistics, engineering, supply chains or any of that other cool shit, but I still feel pretty sure that the next run of Reaper drones will involve rubber bands and balsa.

I hear the UFC matches were pretty good, though.

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Resistance Solidarity

Washington – the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman – refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside.

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, FIFA, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural peace prize – an honour created specifically to stroke his ego…

–Jonathan Cook on Substack, 01.06.2026

Know your enemy.
Choose your fighter.
#GlobalizeIntifada

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TrumpGas

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‘They can still see his headless body stalking through the night
In the muzzle flash of Roland’s Thompson gun’
– Warren Zevon, “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” 1978

This old chestnut from my crazed student daze wasn’t really historically apropos to this cartoon, but it was stuck in my head the whole time I was working on it. It was in our Dorm Top Forty in senior year, when I was drawing in the Yipster Times and my buds and I were getting ready to pie the Dean. I couldn’t begin to explain it; the sonofabitch just kinda leaped out of my memory, cranked to 11.

But, let’s just put those old giggles aside for now, and take ourselves a zesty, steamy gawk at the front page of Pravda On The Potomac from last Thursday (as I write this) – or, as I called it, the “Venezuela Special”. JEEEEzus CHRIST, willya LOOK at that goddamn mess. The main head on the front-page lead piece on the Donster’s latest yo-ho-ho’ing looks as if they’re in on the Cheer For Bullying, Piracy And Thievery Without Actually Cheering For Bullying, Piracy And Thievery Challenge – nothing if not the internal agonizing and mental pretzel-twisting of my imperialist Liberal friends’n’fam made publicly visible. They’re actually in favor of something the Donster is doing, and so they’re just going all splungy. So, what’s he gonna do with the goddamn tanker, now – open his own gas-station chain? “TrumpGas”? He’s already started up his own social-media site and plastered his name all over all kinds of shit, why not gas stations? “You can trust your car to the man who…”

…but, enough of that; let’s move on to the featured foto on the left, where the true hilarity ensues – in which The Courageous Venezuelan Opposition Leader* Who Looks Like The Villainess In A Telenovela And Who Begged Trump To Invade Her Country And Who Can’t Come Out Of Hiding To Accept Her Cracker Jack Peace Prize Sends Her Daughter Instead.

*Note that here, as in all cases, the phrase “opposition leader” in the US press is a stand-in for the phrase “USAID, NED and multiple-corporate-backed right-wing US stooge”.

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All I Want For Christmas

 

…history also remembers those who refused resignation. Those who spoke in the cadence of resistance, who dared to describe the world not as the powerful narrated it, but as the oppressed lived it.
–Peter McLaren at Orinoco Tribune, 11.29.2025

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What really amuses me about all this – besides the fact that the Defense Secretary sounds as if he got lost on the way to ComicCon – is that all the imperialist Liberals out there are strangely silent. I mean, c’mon, peeps – isn’t this what you wanted? Wreck and occupy the place and nab all of our oil that Venezuela had under their country? I mean, that has to be the real mission, after watching the Donster pardon some crooked-ass coke-dealing Honduran politician who was said to have claimed he would shove the cocaine up Americans’ noses personally, or some whacked shit.

Perhaps I don’t watch enough MSNBC – oh, sorry, MSNOW – but all the imperialist Liberals in my life have been real, real, real goddamn quiet. I mean, y’all wanted to get rid of that popularly-elected socialist government which has actually been working to give the People what they want and refuses to suck Uncle Sam’s dick – oh, I’m sorry; that corrupt, brutal dictator, huh? They’re always “brutal dictators” with these Liberals …and you just know the People love Maduro when a rank, fashy rag like the New York Times says that he’s “clinging to power”.

Sometimes, I think it might almost be worth the risk of annihilation to watch Amerika get its ass sucked into another quagmire in Latin America against Russia and China. A ringside seat for the collapse of the Empire would be really sweet.

Hooray for Santy Claus.

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Voter Enthusiasm

 

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I happily confess that nearly my entire contact with Legacy Media™ these days comes from the five minutes or so I spend scoping out the front pages of the Washington Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times – and the New York Post, if I think I can stand it – in search of inspiration at the newsstands of my local bodegas while out on my morning walk.

Isn’t it adorable how all the DNC can think about is getting their goddamn vote out while our neighbors are being snatched and disappeared by gangs of masked thugs, the regime is spitting in our faces on live TV and trying to provoke a civil war, and pretty much every goddamn American institution we were taught to venerate in school has turned out to be total garbage? But yeah, sure, Donkeycrats; let’s get that mid-term vote out.

And what’s with the “voter enthusiasm” thing? Goddamn Democrats can’t shut the hell up with that crap. What, are they bugged that the voters are so goddamn beat down, desperate and indoctrinated that they’re just kind of reflexively dragging their glum, dejected asses out to punch a chad, tap a screen, pull a lever, then back home for “The Price Is Right” instead of eagerly, happily, proudly – dare I say “joyfully” – skipping and singing on their way to the polls?

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Keep 'Em Flying! (in solidarity)

In the words of the immortal John Cleese, my nipples exploded with delight to hear that Palestine was punching the bullies back, and in such spectacularly and totally boss fashion.

And in totally standard fashion, Israeli state mouthpieces are screeching about how this is their Nineleven™, how Hamas came for their babies — pretty much the usual response… never fails — when you punch the bully back, the little punk runs crying to the principal. Meanwhile, at MSNBC, some clown who sounded like he was still in college mentioned how this conflict has been going on “since time immemorial”. Shame I couldn’t pull Junior aside to remind him that the Nakba occurred in 1948, within the memories of many people still living, and that 1948 is not “time immemorial” (before I smacked the living shit out of him).

I can’t pretend I’m not enjoying this, but I don’t know which part of it I’m enjoying more — the idea that the resistance fighters would paraglide in, or watching one Western media babbler after another shitting themselves on the air over the fact that ZOMG THEY’RE USING PARAGLIDERS, THE BASTARDS.

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Fortune Cookie

“Those who play with fire will only get burnt... We hope the U.S. side can see this clearly.” — Xi Jinping, to Joe Biden, 07.28.2022

Y'ever get Chinese carry-out and play that stupid game with the fortune cookies where you scribble the phrase "in bed" at the end of the banal faux-Confucian "fortune" in a childish effort to make it sound "dirty" somehow?

Oh, c'mon; I know y'all have done it. I've done it a bunch — and that kind of puerile, low-brow joke seems a fitting analogy to portray the arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, belligerence, recklessness and straight-up stupidity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Provoke World War III If It's The Last Goddamn Thing I Ever Do Tour this week. It's as if her staff went out of their way to script the most irksome, provocative, sabre-rattling batshit takes they could possibly come up with for her, as if they just followed her around with an mp3 recorder and transcribed everything the old bat queefed out.

The really sad thing about Pelosi, Blinken, Biden and their ilk, though, is that they really, honestly think they're the greatest goddamn thing on two legs. They really do think people are impressed with this horseshit. 

Still, as an American, I have to appreciate the Speaker keeping me briefed in on who "America" is standing with right now. Between standing with Israel, the Uyghurs, the Ukraine, and now Taiwan, it's looking like this "American" is booked pretty solid these days.

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A Frightening Situation

 

Inspired by the rip-roaring coverage of atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by America's Official Enemy against the Ukraine in the very same corporate-owned Western media who worked itself to death to cover up atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by the Earth's enemy against Iraq and Afghanistan — not to mention pushing the most insane-ass kind of comic-book lies about (ahem) Weapons Of Mass Destruction — about 18, 20 years or so ago. But, now...? Cripes, man, the Boss Media in the US and its "international community" are all about war crimes and atrocities and bombed civilians and the Hague n'shit. Wotta goddamn joke.

I shit you not, kiddies — if this were a foto of a similar scene in Gaza, of Palestinian women getting ready to resist the terrorism of the IDF and Israeli colonists, do you honestly think Reuters — and MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, all the usual suspects — would run some noble, heart-wrenching piece on ordinary women rushing to the defense of their country against invaders?

Naaaaahhhhhhhhhh. It'd be some horseshit about defenseless, peaceful little Israelis just minding their own while the mean, evil terrorist Palestinians try to resist the defenseless, peaceful little Israelis' attempts to drive them out of their homes and murder them.

The likes of Reuters didn't give a shit about civilians during the US invasion of Iraq, and they don't really give a shit now. They didn't give a shit about war crimes during the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't really give a shit now.  

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Afghan Women's Liberation no. 2 (or, Won't Somebody Think Of The Women?)

 

When the US first set out inflicting two decades of destruction and misery on Afghanistan the Liberals, true to the old Phil Ochs song, were never more red, white and blue — and the Liberals' most appallingly cynical appeals for support for that debacle came from the "imperial Feminists" who tried to tug our heartstrings with horror stories about burqas, illicit nail salons, and no HBO. 

So, it was no surprise when America's Imperial Feminists picked up where they left off, joining the chorus of bitching, pissing, moaning and sour-graping about their being run out of Afghanistan, reviving the tired old bromides about women's rights and how the US "left women behind" when it dragged its bloody ass out of the place after twenty years in the Graveyard Of Empires.

The most unctous of these was an article in The Atlantic which dragged out every one of those tired old arguments, hoary old horseshit so old it's got SCSI ports on the back. What was merely appalling twenty years ago is absolutely godawful today, considering the current abuse of working-class women in the US, and in US satellite states like Saudi Arabia:

One reason that we stayed in Afghanistan so long with nothing to show for it except the safety of women, @CaitlinPacific writes, is that for all of our sins, our default position is freedom.

—The Atlantic, @theatlantic on Twitter, 08.19.2021

Says on the author's profile that she traffics in "thought crimes for all occasions". I wouldn't know about that, but that article of hers sure is a goddamn crime, I'll tell ya that for free.

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Like Generations Before...

Yeah, uh huh… like in Vietnam. And Nicaragua. And Iraq.

This was my other favorite quote from Obama’s Afghanistan speech, a crass naked appeal to American conceit. Matthew Rothschild writes in The Progressive:

Our war president promised more war. While he trumpeted his big Afghanistan speech as the first step in ending that war, Barack Obama essentially told the American people that tens of thousands of our soldiers would still be fighting there for at least three more years.

A year from now, Obama said all the additional “surge” troops will be back home. But the U.S. will still have close to 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, twice the number that were there when Obama took office.

Only “by 2014,” he said, will the Afghan people “be responsible for their own security.”

And even then, Obama appears to have left himself an out. “We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we made,” he said. But what if those “gains” aren’t kept? Would he reverse course and keep more troops there…?

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Greetings From Haiti!

Y'know, I hardly know where to start with this. Perhaps I could start with this gob-smacking foto of ex-Presidents Bubba and Chimp, both smiling their most smarmy and smug smiles as they accept the position of Special Envoys in charge of the Haitian relief effort. That's right, ex-President I Invaded Haiti In The '90s and ex-President Heckuva Job Brownie have been placed in charge of Haitian earthquake relief, and the bastards are frickin' smiling... and President Timberlake, there, seems just barely able to contain himself as well. What perfect cover for a little bit of that "vulture capitalism".



Or, perhaps this amazingly soulless, brutalist David Brooks column from the New York Times might work for you. In it, he calls for the throwing away of any tolerance or respect for foreign cultures and calls for "intrusive paternalism" at least half a dozen times in a page and a half of thinly-veiled racist spewage. In spirit and letter, it's really no different from any similar racist spewage about Haiti and the Dominican Republic published in the New York Times a century or so ago; Noam Chomsky writes in Year 501:

Times editors lauded the "unselfish and helpful" attitude that the US had always shown, now once again as it responded "in a fatherly way" as Haiti "sought help here." Our "unselfish intervention has been moved almost exclusively by a desire to give the benefits of peace to people tormented by repeated revolutions," with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise," for ourselves. "The people of the island should realize that [the US government] is their best friend." The US sought only to ensure that "the people were cured of the habit of insurrection and taught how to work and live"; they "would have to be reformed, guided and educated," and this "duty was undertaken by the United States." There is a further benefit for our "black brother": "To wean these peoples away from their shot-gun habit of government is to safeguard them against our own exasperation," which might lead to further intervention. "The good-will and unselfish purposes of our own government" are demonstrated by the consequences, the editors wrote in 1922, when they were all too apparent and the Marine atrocities had already aroused a storm of protest.

However, if comic relief is what you're after, don't despair; former US Senator John "Senator Goodhair" Edwards is going to Haiti to help out, also -- with cameras conveniently present, of course.

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