John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SAM HUSSEINI IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Biden Has Been Lying About His Record on Iraq for Years
“Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his surrogates such as former Secretary of State John Kerry continue to falsely claim that he did not favor the Iraq invasion”
Biden has always been a pretty sleazy operator. And not just in his lying about his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Look back at his record as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the matter of Anita Hill’s charges about a Supreme Court nominee. Shabby.
He consistently supported wars and coups through his career. He worked closely with Obama on carrying some of them out. He served as Obama’s proconsul in Ukraine for a coup against an elected government, and appears to have gained financially from the work.
All the wars and coups, of course, involve deceit about what is actually taking place. So, he’s had a lot of practice with avoiding truth.
Biden is credited with helping convince Obama to start America’s extrajudicial killing industry. A hi-tech update of the old Argentine Junta’s “disappearing” people by the thousands without any charge or trial or defense. Now, a nameless operator sits at a screen playing computer games with real human beings.
Remember, he received the Medal of Freedom from Obama – that’s Obama of the jocular statement, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” - and you don’t get that award without doing some seriously dirty work for America’s empire. Just ask Madeline Albright.
Somehow, Biden’s smile and folksy way of talking fool a lot of people.
Same phenomenon we saw with Obama.
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Response to a comment saying, “Trump will be laughing his head off if Biden is the nominee”
Unless external events intervene – real possibilities include economic collapse or war with Iran – Trump will likely be re-elected. He's the devil they know, and he has many bamboozled into thinking he has achieved something. It is not hard to bamboozle large portions of America, the land of P. T. Barnum and Hollywood and Madison Avenue. If the impeachment fails, as seems likely, he will have come through an ordeal, gaining some sympathy and receiving, as it were, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
News services are so manipulated in the United States that most people have no real understanding of what is going on in the world. A war might even help Trump if enough people believe Iran is evil and a threat to dear old America, and that he is there with his absurdly posed faces and bellowing to protect them. Americans have heard the claim that Iran is somehow malign repeated in the press in one form or another for forty years, and you would not find any Democratic candidate saying otherwise for fear of losing special-interest campaign funding.
Money replaces information in telling your story and getting it “out there.” Always remembering that owing to America’s antiquated, anti-democratic Electoral College system, only some people in certain marginal or swing locations need to be convinced of any such story. Those places receive intense campaigns of market research and polls and then advertising regurgitating what the polls say people want to hear. You can win with a minority, as Trump did in 2016 and as George Bush did in 2000. Trump, by virtue of his various services to special interests, some in complete violation of international law, will have the mother lode of cash.
The Democrats just do not have good material on offer. No spark. No heroism. Dull establishment views.
Bernie Sanders has his strong points, but he is old, has had a heart attack, and showed serious weakness vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and her theft of the nomination in 2016.
Tulsi Gabbard, a really promising politician, is simply ignored by the Democratic establishment and the press.
It really doesn’t matter which of the candidates wins. They are all married to the Pentagon and war and empire, and with the United States spending about a trillion dollars a year, of borrowed money, for the military/security establishment, no social program of any consequence can possibly be enacted.
All the leading Democratic candidates worship at the altar of the Pentagon and CIA and special interests in the Middle East, just as Trump does.
American “democracy” is looking more threadbare and meagre than ever.
