JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: A GROTESQUE PIECE OF PROPAGANDA - COMPARING TRUMP'S PRINCELY LIFE DURING VIETNAM WAR TO JOHN MCCAIN'S BROKEN BONES - TRUE POLITICAL TRASH

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST


This piece is uninformed trash. It tries to make a contrast in lives and character that simply does not exist.

The shabby stuff about Trump’s sexual voyeurism, juxtaposed to McCain’s broken bones in Vietnam, is grotesquely distorted. McCain’s record of sexual behavior is no more elevated than what the author asserts about Trump, and Mccain’s record as a soldier merits no praise.

McCain, when married or single, has a long reputation as a skirt-chasing reprobate. He is also an ugly bully who has always thrown around the weight of his family connections. McCain was a bully in school as a boy. He was a bully in the military. And is a bully as a senator.

The boyish smile, a gift of genes and having nothing to do with his actual character, easily deceives people.

His service in the military was in not one detail heroic. Having a father and grandfather who were senior admirals, this spoiled brat came under tremendous pressure to follow in their military footsteps even though he had neither their brains nor skills nor attitude.

He joined, making a muck of it all the way along including plenty of bullying and crashing five airplanes, but the pilot image also came with the traditional romantic image for women and earned him a good many opportunities for wild fun.

The simple fact is that neither of these men is in any way admirable, both being spoiled brats with lots of money and almost no ethics. They both have horrible, temperaments with ferociously maniacal anger, hardly suited to making calm decisions let alone having a finger on ‘the button.’

Trump is amusing right now because he saying things people instinctively know as true and are not used to hearing from public figures, something true of no other candidate. All of the candidates typically mouth slightly varied versions of the same official boilerplate rhetoric. Politics in America is no fun at all, so a tiny break is amusing.

But that doesn't mean he in any way merits being president. He would make a terrible president, resembling in many ways the recent loud-mouthed horror of Mayor Ford in Toronto, someone ordinary people voted for thinking he was one of them and also knowing they were tired of trite, thoughtless stuff delivered by the likes of Mayor David Miller. Neither Ford nor Miller were good mayors in reality.

And neither Trump nor McCain would be even half-adequate presidents.

If you want to know more about McCain’s background, see:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/?s=John+McCain&searchsubmit=Find+%C2%BB

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/political-bits-and-pieces/

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS - FUN TO WATCH - JEB BUSH AS EXCITING AS WARM OVALTINE

COMMENT POSTED TO THE GUARDIAN


Ya just gotta love Trump tossing hand grenades into the Republican headquarters.

The great irony is that it takes a nasty piece of work like Trump to speak truth to the other nasty pieces of work making up the party.

It all resembles a loony billionaire wearing a suicide vest to a high-end cocktail party.

Of course he leads Jeb Bush, a man who has all the appeal of a large glass of warm Ovaltine.

QUOTING TONY BLAIR ON LABOUR PARTY'S LEADERSHIP CONTEST - BLAIR'S CHARACTER - THE DEVIL'S BLOODIEST WORK - ALMOST CERTAIN PSYCHOPATHY

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN


Well, when you interview someone who has done the Devil's bloodiest work, you surely cannot expect to get views that are generous or thoughtful or even worthwhile.

Featuring Tony Blair's opinions, as the Guardian did, truly is not far from featuring the views of a Grand Inquisitor holding a record of thousands of public executions to his credit.

Blair is quite simply a man who never did anything of significance good for anyone beyond his own career and is very likely, in a psychological test, to reveal serious traits of psychopathy, especially the Narcissism.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: COMMENT ON A REPORT ABOUT THE CURRENT MISERABLE STATE OF GAZA - ISRAEL'S SAVAGERY IS GENERALLY IGNORED AND CANNOT BE EXCUSED BY WHAT HAPPENED IN A DIFFERENT PLACE AND TIME

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN (AND PROMPTLY REMOVED)


It is a shame upon Europe and the United States that this savagery is allowed to continue.

What one group of fanatics in a different country in a different continent did to Jews three-quarters of a century ago cannot possibly excuse this ghastly behavior towards these people today.

Yet America and Europe behave as though it does.

Any government behaving in this fashion towards people who literally are their prisoners not only deserves severe condemnation but should be severely pressured to stop.

But, no, perhaps the worst human rights abuse on a per-capita basis by any government on the planet today is quietly allowed to continue with no real consequences.

And for the most part the mainstream press, serving the interests of indifferent governments, helps to keep it out of public awareness.

And the country carrying out these many barbarous acts is treated as though it were a worthy member of Western society.

It is not, full stop. Iran has a better human rights record, if truth be told.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: IRAN ASSERTING ITSELF IN THE MIDDLE EAST - A WAY OF SAYING SOMETHING NEGATIVE ABOUT SOMETHING NORMAL

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN


I think the headline is worded badly.

Iran has no need to "assert” its right to play a role in the Middle East. This is its neighborhood.

Iran has a role just naturally owing to its great size - more population than France or Britain - and to the fact it has many cultural and historic connections throughout the region.

Israel, for example, is a newcomer and its main population consists largely of Americans and Europeans. Many of its traditions and symbols and its culture are imports into the region from just decades ago.

Persia has an immense history, and it is even likely the place of origin for the biblical Hebrews - not the Ashkenazim who immigrated to modern Israel and almost certainly have no relationship other than religion with the ancient Hebrews.

America's deliberate destruction of Iraq - done largely for the geo-political benefit of Israel - has only opened up new opportunities for Iranian influence too. That invasion will surely prove to have been a vast mistake in the long run, and I don't mean just because of Iran's new opportunities.

But people addicted to war and using force in their affairs – America and Israel, modern Iran never having attacked anyone – just do not understand that they cannot remold societies with bombs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: DONALD TRUMP ON JOHN MCCAIN - THE ONE TIME TRUMP ACTUALLY SAID SOMETHING TRUE - BUT THERE IS MORE: A BRIEF REVIEW OF MCCAIN'S SHABBY CHARACTER

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST

 Actually, this is one of the few times I find myself in at least some agreement with Trump.

Indeed, I'd go farther and say McCain never remotely qualified as a hero. By the time the Vietnam War was over, Americans were desperate for some kind of meaning in all those ghastly years of killing and destruction and defeat, so they fixed on the released POWs from Vietnam who received inordinate and undeserved attention.

When McCain was shot down, he had been bombing civilians around Hanoi. Heroes do not bomb civilians, unless the word hero has a new meaning I don't understand.

After he was shot down, a Vietnamese man saved his life because he landed in water. That decent, poor man never received any serious thanks from creepy McCain.

McCain made a big deal about his treatment in prison, but other American prisoners have said he received special treatment. After all, his father and grandfather were admirals, and the Vietnamese absolutely knew this.

All McCain's early years, whether in school or the military, were spent acting out the role of loud-mouthed bully, counting on his father's exalted position to intimidate people. He was a nasty piece of work and still is.

When he returned home, McCain discovered his wife had been in a serious car accident, and she was badly disfigured. He promptly divorced her and eventually married Cindy, an extremely wealthy woman whose chief hobby was making first-class shopping flights to New York. Again, his behavior was hardly the stuff of which heroes are made.

Later, Cindy developed a taste for hard drugs and was caught stealing from the organization for which she did some volunteer work.

Senator McCain disgracefully used his influence to get her off with virtually no consequences. I've never heard McCain speak up for the thousands of American blacks who've done hard prison time for being caught with the same drugs Cindy used. Again, hardly the class of heroes.

There is more, but McCain is just one of those charmed rich boys - not unlike Georgy Bush - who've gotten away with murder over and over and still manages to hang on to some public admiration.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: YOUNG GIRL IN GERMANY FIRST REFUSED REFUGEE STATUS NOW RECEIVES IT - WHAT RARELY-DISCUSSED FACT IS BEHIND THE IMMENSE FLOOD OF REFUGEES TODAY? AMERICA'S SHAME

POSTED TO A STORY IN THE GUARDIAN

This was a disheartening story about a girl refused refugee status in Germany, and I am glad for one good outcome even if her changed status is just public relations to overcome bad press.

But what really is lurking behind all the stories today of millions of refugees?

The answer is pretty simple although almost never touched by our press: countless millions have been displaced during America's unprecedented rampage through the Middle East, destroying countries and people. Iraq, Syria, and Libya plus bombing in Yemen and revolution in Egypt. 

And does America do anything to take the unfortunate refugees it has created?

No, as is the case for David Cameron's nasty-spirited Britain and Stephen Harper's selfish Canada, not to mention the Australia of atrocious Tony Abbott.

Ms. Merkel's Germany, a pretty densely populated country, has taken hundreds of thousands of refugees, even though Germany is not part of the ignorant American-led terror creating them all.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: ANALYSIS OF AN ARTICLE ASSERTING THAT PRESSURE ON ISRAEL DOES NOT HELP BECAUSE ISRAELIS WANT PEACE TOO

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Well, there is peace, and there is peace.

What most of the earth's people instinctively understand as peace is not what most Israelis want, I am convinced, and I am convinced solely by the realities I see, not by beliefs or faith or any other quasi-religious stuff.

They want, as best we can judge, by a long series of leaders and the general behavior of its people, peace on their own terms, and that is not what peace ever really is. Unconditional surrender is not peace.

By "their terms" I mean they want much of the remaining territory they have illegally occupied for half a century, but they want it without the people who live there. Nothing else explains Israel’s history. Where are those people to go? Anywhere, who cares, everything from the Sinai to Jordan having been advocated.

Israel’s vision of Palestine is a kind of amorphous thing floating out there somewhere in space, a place with almost no rights or initiatives, a place that serves as a vast encampment for a reserve pool of manual labor, pretty much the way they have kept things for half a century.

I don't see how it can be otherwise, judging by actual behavior and leaders’ words.

It is either less than honest or rather foolish to say that pressure doesn't help in terrible situations like this. Is the author blind to history?

How was apartheid ended in South Africa? Relentless pressure.

How was the Jim Crow South in the United States brought around? Relentless pressure.

Israel itself is a great believer in pressure and sanctions as we can see from countless examples, the savage situation in Gaza being the most extreme, but this belief extends only so far as the things Israel wants, not to what others want or are entitled. Relentless pressure for whatever it wants, including the America’s invasion of Iraq, the invasion by a proxy army of Syria, the invasion of Lebanon, regime change in Egypt, and serious threats of attacking Iran, a totally peaceful country. Israel is also in bed with such absolute regimes as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Generalissimo-run Egypt, and others. Thus while it goes on in speeches about democracy, its best friends and workmates in the region are tyrants.

The author only offers one more instance of tiresome special pleading for Israel, as though it were somehow exempt from all the normal expectations and behaviors of human society.

Sadly, being exempt pretty much summarizes Israel’s entire brief history: constantly making demands and threats, unleashing extreme violence periodically, treating millions as rather less than human, a long series of black operations and assassinations, and just relentless pressure on everyone, including its chief benefactor, the United States.

But Israel is not exempt. If you want the rule of law, you must yourself abide by the law, the law being our only protection in the long-run against the baser instincts of humanity. If we want Israel to join the ranks of normal countries - instead of continuing as a rather brutal occupying power which stunts and abuses the lives of millions while periodically stealing their property, always mouthing empty platitudes about democracy and human rights - only pressure will achieve it.

The author’s argument is really for the status quo with words dolled up in attractive window dressing.

_________________

A comment about Palestinians wanting only to destroy Israel:

Thanks for repeating the official boiler-plate.

We've likely heard that a thousand times in the last half century, and it is no truer now than it was at the beginning.

Now, if you really believe what you say, it follows logically that you might begin to ask, well, if that's the case, was putting Israel where it is a great mistake?

Is Israel's entire future to be nothing but a heavily armed garrison state? And who will want to live there in future? And is it even sustainable?

No matter what slogans you repeat over and over, in the end peace is the only meaningful choice.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: OBSERVATIONS ON THE IRAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT - FINALLY A REAL ACHIEVEMENT FOR OBAMA - IRAN AND HUMAN RIGHTS

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

The nuclear agreement with Iran is Obama's first serious achievement as President.

Everybody, except the madman running Israel, knows that it is important.

Virtually all intelligence services have agreed that Iran is not pursuing atomic weapons anyway, yet they had to be seriously punished with sanctions to please Israel and its lobby.

Of course, the question which always goes unasked and unanswered in the press is why Israel is free to sit on an atomic arsenal?

The real threat ahead is Netanyahu trying to do something really stupid to destroy the agreement.

_____________________________

To a comment about Iran should be required now to work hard now on human rights:

Sorry, what's your point?

Look at the photos readily available on the Internet, and you will see a lot of happy, beautiful people in Iran.

No, they don't have every ideal of freedom, but what country does?

The United States is today one of the world's more repressive and unjust states, and the same certainly goes for its nasty little colony in the Mideast which holds half the people under its rule against their will.

We never, however, get a word about that in the mainstream press, only more cliches like yours about Iran.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: COMMENTS TO AN ARTICLE ASKING WHETHER DONALD TRUMP WOULD BE A GOOD PRESIDENT

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

Not much to a reader’s observation about Putin and Trump being similar.

In fact, they are almost opposites in many ways.

Putin is soft-spoken, strategic in his thinking, and cunning.

Trump resembles nothing so much as a perpetual drunk shooting his mouth off at whatever crosses his path.

Trump is a walking emotional explosion.

__________________________________

In response to a reader who thinks big businessmen make good leaders:

Big businessmen and generals virtually always make poor presidents.

They are used to barking out orders, but that does not work in the real political world.

Clever persuasion is what's needed, a quality Trump lacks utterly.

____________________________________

To a reader who thinks I don’t realize the importance of the economy in the election:

Oh, I do think I ``realize.``

After all, I am a retired chief economist for a large Canadian company.

Anyone who understands classical economics knows that a government leader has very little to do with the performance of the real economy.

They do like to pose and strut around and take credit for what goes right, but it is mostly empty-headed nonsense.

The one way government can assist an economy is doing its basic job of providing essential infrastructure, avoiding wasteful spending like stupid wars, and seeing that the children receive good education. The United States has failed in every one of these essentials for decades, Republicans or Democrats making no difference.

You also fail to really comprehend Clinton`s election slogan. He was reminding himself of the importance of speaking on the campaign trail about what is important to ordinary people. In American politics, speaking about a subject is almost never the same thing as actually doing something about it if elected.

That was certainly true of Clinton, a pretty classless president who had not one admirable achievement.

As for Trump, he is a big-mouthed fraud, a confidence man, not an expert on economics, full stop.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: IS NOW A GOOD TIME TO NUKE RUSSIA? IDIOT COMMENTS FROM AN AMERICAN ON THE MATTER - EXPLANATION OF AMERICA'S CHANGING ATTITUDES - ISRAEL TOO - DANGEROUS TIMES AHEAD

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

The quote from Ezra Kaplan reflects a kind of loose-lipped non-think now common in the United States, almost making a joke of mass-murder.

There was a time when most Americans regarded nuclear war as unthinkable.

But the public culture does seem to have changed, and I believe there are two key influences at work in changing it, and they are to a considerable extent interrelated.

First, is a growing sense of the relative decline of America is world affairs. This is something it is not easy for the average American to accept, raised as they were in the faith that America was king of all that it surveyed.

Yes, it has fearsome forces all over the world still, but, day by day, more countries reach a level where they can challenge America's bullying, and this is a phenomenon that will only continue as countries like the BRICS start reaching their full potential.

A world with a state behaving as an international bully is even more dangerous than an individual state run by a tyrant. A multi-polar world is the only structure to safeguard the future until the likely remote time that forms of proper international law and governance can evolve.

I think there is also a perception in America's establishment that it only has a limited time to use its current strength to re-inforce its geo-political domination before the relative decline becomes more apparent.

Thus, we have events like the coup in Ukraine and the reckless advance of NATO forces in Eastern Europe as well as America's dangerous moves in the South China Sea. America’s new military doctrine, sanctifying its right to invade any country but an ally, is the ultimate official document supporting the establishment’s fears. It is, in effect, a startling rejection of the Nuremberg Trials and of international laws and accords.

Second is the genuinely pernicious influence of Israel's government on public opinion in the US. Does a day pass that Netanyahu does not threaten someone, rage about something, demand something, or actually attack someone, generally killing many civilians, all the while claiming he stands for human values and democracy?

His outrages are not criticised from the US and its sadly obsequious partner, the EU, so that over time people begin to think of such behavior as in some way normal.

The two causes are related in that Israel has a special purpose in American geo-political thinking and enjoys an almost untouchable position in the US press, almost no matter how savagely it acts: Israel serves as an American quasi-colony in the Middle East.

That relationship too faces serious problems in the future with the relative decline of America and the general failure of Israel to become a self-sustaining entity. Israel is simply the most subsidized place on the planet and maintains a military-intelligence structure that is tremendously costly and out of all proportion to its economy, and that is not something which can go on indefinitely.

Israel, too, is keen to secure its dominance before it faces serious readjustments in its arrangements. This propels it do very dangerous acts with little regard for its neighbors.

So I do think there are very dangerous times ahead, perhaps the next couple of decades, and it is a good thing Russia has seriously re-invigorated its deterrent. It is important to the entire world that America's growing paranoia and uncertainty do not tempt to act as Israel does in its sphere.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: ISRAEL ATTACKING THE USS LIBERTY IN THE SIX DAY WAR AND THE POSSIBLE SECRET ROLE OF LYNDON JOHNSON

COMMENT ON AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

There is no question that Israel committed this crime.

The real question is why Lyndon Johnson tolerated its lies. He was not a patient man and certainly not a forgiving one.

I think it quite possible Johnson secretly cooperated with the Israelis on the attack and wanted that fact covered up. Perhaps he hoped to use it as an excuse to attack Russians?

Johnson was a vicious, murderous man, quite capable of anything.

Just as are the Israelis.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE KLU KLUX KLAN - NASTY AND RIDICULOUS BUT NOT EVEN A REMOTE DANGER COMPARED TO SO MANY EVENTS IN OUR WORLD - TALKING ABOUT IT MIGHT BE UNDERSTOOD AS A DIVERSION FROM REAL HORRORS

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

While the Klu Klux Klan is a nasty and rather ridiculous organization, as a source of evil in today's world it is minuscule, almost non-existent.

They were once a true national organization in America, as was the NAZI-like Bund organization, but today they are few in few places and virtually unseen.

It seems to me almost a distraction from our many far more terrible events in the world to spend time on what today is a kind of goofy club for people with various degrees of mental problems.

Actually, it might be said that the modern KKK almost serves a slightly beneficial purpose in bringing such people together into one organization rather than let them all go their various ways, and that organization today is thoroughly penetrated by government agents, a task the creepy FBI of J. Edgar Hoover in his heyday scrupulously avoided. After all, Hoover wouldn’t even employ black agents.

On the measure of threats, the KKK today is close to non-existent.

Hate and twisted minds will never cease to be until science either re-engineers the human brain or replaces it with robots.

You must always take account of perspective in such social phenomena. America's militarized local police alone kill between 1,000 and 1,500 citizens every year, injuring several times that number.

Americans murdering Americans has ranged over recent decades between 25 and 40 thousand each year. By the way, roughly half of that murder is black-on-black in America's dreadful ghettos.

The President of the United States signs off regularly now on death-squad killings. Thousands have died this way with no charges, no trial, and no voice, drones and computer operators being the only difference from the old Argentine junta dropping people out of helicopters.

America killed more than a million people in Iraq and pretty much destroyed one of the Mideast's most advanced and promising lands. It would have become a true democracy before too long under prosperity and a growing middle class. Today it is divided wreck.

America and its friends have created a living hell in Syria by supplying, training, and infiltrating lunatic factions into a beautiful and once relatively peaceful land, killing 200,000 and seeing millions of refugees created, refugees they do not even try to help.

Libya is a flaming wreckage today thanks to America and its spineless European associates.

And only four decades ago, America walked away from a true holocaust it created in Vietnam, 3 million dead from napalm and carpet bombing and fragment bombs and land mines and countless tons of Agent Orange.

Its blundering interference in Cambodia saw a neutral government fall and another million innocents die in the Killing Fields.

America’s quasi-colony in the Middle East just killed 2,200 people including about 500 children using American weapons, and that after a previous slaughter of about 1,200, and still they blockade the poor survivors and make weekly threats.

There are many more statistics I could cite, but truly the KKK is about as important as slipping on a banana peel as a source of genuine danger.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: JEB BUSH'S GROTESQUE COMMENT ABOUT HOW AMERICANS SHOULD WORK HARDER - FACTS ABOUT HOW AMERICANS DO WORK - IGNORANCE OF AMERICAN OLIGARCHS - WORD ABOUT GUNS IN AMERICA

POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

Americans are among the West's hardest-working people.

Those with good quality jobs - analysts, managers, specialists of every kind - often put in 12-hour days.

And America's great corporations expect this as a matter of course.

This class of Americans almost always have both husband and wife working to even be able to keep up a good, middle-class lifestyle.

It is a fact that per-capita, real earnings for America's middle class have fallen for decades.

Those without good jobs - and there are tens of millions - work 2 or 3 part-time jobs to make a living, and because their work is all part-time, they have no benefits at all.

In some companies who pay quite poorly - notably Wal-Mart or McDonald’s – workers are sometimes directed to social assistance agencies for a scrap of help.

The actual number of unemployed is tremendously understated in unemployment stats because those who have given up actively looking are not counted.

In general, workers' benefits - family leave, child care, holidays, sick days, vacation, and others - are pretty much the stingiest in the West.

In addition, in most poor areas of the country, the public schools are unbelievably poor in quality so that the young are not well-equipped for the future.

These words out of Bush's mouth show what a hopeless, uninformed clown he is. Remember, his rich daddy had never seen the inside of supermarket until he went to one on a campaign stop, and he just blubbered over the way groceries were checked out by bar code, something ordinary Americans had known for years.

What a pathetic group of candidates is running for this dumb-show election.

Rude loudmouths, crooks, ignorant, and privileged jerks – but all of them dedicated to a stronger America, endless mountains of spending on the military.

And all any of them will do to help their own people at home is preach to them.

America today is all about its gigantic military and intelligence apparatus and trying to undermine every state in the world who disagrees with its intentions. The only beneficiaries are those institutions and monstrously-greedy corporations they serve and protect.

Oligarchs in America? You bet, and probably more so than in any other country other than Israel, America’s miniature replica colony in the Middle East.

Working Americans get nothing, no government attention, no real help, no policies to improve things - just dumb, almost-mocking words like those of Jeb Bush.

It is a brutal place to live in many ways, a fact often under-appreciated by observers abroad.

___________________________________________

Response to a comment:

You are not thinking or have a very odd sense of humor.

Americans should make use of their guns? How?

Against the best-equipped armed forces on the planet?

Against a well-equipped secondary army called the National Guard based in every state?

Against a huge, belligerent and heavily-militarized police in every city? Police with an international reputation for violence who kill somewhere on the order of 1,000 to 1,500 citizens each year as it is?

Even the most cuckoo American must understand in private that all talk of "resistance” or “rebellion" or “demanding their rights” is stupidly naive.

The real, unspoken reason for America's high ownership of guns is fear of its black population, a group greater in size then the entire population of California. Just as slaveholders in 1850s went to bed each night with a gun and/or a dagger under the pillow, Americans today still do.

And vehicles like SUVs and massive pick-up trucks - fuel wasters all - owned in suburbia are psychologically about suburbanites having to drive through poor areas in something resembling an armored car.

It ain't pretty, but that is the hard truth of contemporary America, and no politician will touch any of it with a pole.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: IRAN MUSEUM TO MURDERED NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS AND WHO KILLED THEM - NATURE OF ISRAEL'S SELF-PROCLAIMED DEMOCRACY MUCH LIKE THE OLD CONFEDERATE STATES - SIX-DAY WAR FACTS

POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

"...the state claims were murdered by Israeli spies."

Claims?

Are you kidding?

Who else but Israel - whose leaders have a long record of killing innocent people and launching weekly rants about non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons - has a motive to do these murders?

Only Saudi Arabia, but that is virtually the same thing as saying Israel.

The absolute monarchy and the one-kind-of-people-only "democracy" work hand-in-glove now on regional policy, as they do on supporting cutthroats like ISIS.

_________________________

Comment in response to another:

Yours is the silly repetition of official slogans, but then I don’t doubt you are one of the thousands of Israelis paid so much a word by the government to fill discussion sites with such “truths.” The purest dishonesty, surely.

Israel is a democracy only and exactly in the sense that the American Confederacy and apartheid South Africa were democracies. After all, the select or privileged population voted in both those historical places. But no one else voted and no one else had any rights.

You cannot meaningfully call a place a democracy where half the people living under its government have no votes.

Besides, genuine democracies have Bills or Charters of Rights to prevent a majority from tyrannizing minorities. After all, even genuine democracies are capable of evil behavior. That’s why there are Bills and Charters of Rights. Israel has none, and it cannot ever have one, a meaningful one, so long as it holds to its ugly Netanyahu-Sharon form of existence - that is, a garrison state holding millions of unwilling prisoners and attacking every neighbor that it has.

Yours is pure Ministry of Truth nonsense about being surrounded by tyrannies.

We see clearly that the tyrannies are Israel's best secret friends. Israel’s best secret partners in crime today are the tyrant now ruling in Egypt, the absolute Saudi Royal family, and ghastly Qatar. Israel loved Mubarak for thirty years, never mind the misery he inflicted upon Egyptians.

Israel loves having a Generalissimo in Egypt suppressing Egyptians, a Generalissimo quietly friendly to Israel to keep his American pay-offs. Israel hated the late elected government in Egypt simply because it knows that the people of Egypt do not agree with Israel's suppression of Palestinians, its piracy on the high seas, and, in general, its self-assumed role of Decider of Affairs in the Middle East, with all the costs paid by its American imperial sponsor.

If you examine Israel’s behaviors - ignoring empty, insincere words and slogans  - Israel is the de facto tyrant of the region - threatening everyone, assassinating, attacking, and demanding this and that through its entire brief existence.

Even the Six Day War was carefully engineered to make the Arabs look like bad guys while the entire point was to steal all the property of others it yet holds: Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Golan Heights. It was the very height of hypocrisy and blubbering about poor David fighting off Goliath.

It doesn't matter how many empty words you utter, in the end Israel's current situation is untenable. The world will not in the long run allow you to keep all the properties of others you stole in that war.

Israel is a great puffed-up presence in the area, puffed up by countless subsidies and allowances from others. Even Israel's many human rights crimes have been tolerated in view of guilt over what Germany did 70 years ago. But the realities are just too terrible now to keep suppressed. Millions as prisoners with no rights at all, and government after government attacks everyone they do not like. I do not detect an ounce of difference from the old South Africa, which, by the way was a great friend and trading partner of Israel’s too.

Even Israel's own people will not want to go on long as the world's greatest garrison state and, on per-capita basis, the world's greatest suppressor of human rights. After all, even the most repressive systems like the Soviets or Apartheid South Africa always collapse in the end.

And the Jewish people in Canada, America, or Britain lead infinitely richer lives than the ordinary ones in Israel who must fight, pay huge prices, live in a controlled environment, swallow endless nonsense, and often cannot even afford a home.