In case you had any doubt about Rage Against the Machine being in the running for the most appropriate soundtrack of the Trump era, look at Giuliani's appearance at the beginning of this 1999 Michael Moore-directed video for "Sleep Now in the Fire," and the bizarre campaign poster that makes a prophetic appearance at the 1'04" mark.
Rage may not be touring or recording now, but we have their songs being given new life by Brass Against the Machine. This version of "Wake Up" was just posted ten days ago.
This video from Fahrenheit 9/11 about the businesses that benefit from war is as relevant to the current saber rattling about Iran as it was to our Iraq invasion. (Halliburton isn't the only beneficiary, despite the title of the video.)
And here's your quote of the day from the 2'20" mark of the video:
"War is always good for certain companies, I mean, that are in the war busi...the business of war." --Sam Kubba, American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce
OK. Please stop laughing, BUT IF George Bush and Dick Cheney are ever brought to justice for war crimes generally, and specifically for the illegal and unjustified destruction of Iraq, then this article in The New York Times today, "Claims Against Saudis Cast New Light on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report," should play at least some role in their prosecution. If they really were classifying parts of the 9/11 commission report in December 2002 that showed actual links to Saudi officials while still ginning up fictional ties between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to begin their war, then this piece of evidence shouldn't be forgotten at their trial (again, please stop laughing).
This issue isn't even new, as shown by this exchange between Dick Cheney and Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" on September 14, 2003, when we were only six months into our never-ending war along the Tigris and Euphrates. Cheney was still trotting out discredited Iraqi links and there were already rumors about the Saudi government connections contained in the suppressed sections of the 9/11 Report:
Dick Cheney: ... With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.
Tim Russert: We could establish a direct link between the hijackers of September 11 and Saudi Arabia.
Cheney: We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn’t mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That’s a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the ’90s. That was clearly official policy.
Russert: There are reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public.
Cheney: I don’t know want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. ..."
The shorter version? It's perfectly fine if the fictional Czech story of the Iraqi link is somehow "public out there" (with no help from Bush and Cheney, obviously), but the true Saudi link needs to be kept from the public.
Now for the happy musical outro courtesy of Michael Moore and REM who put all of this into a 2004 movie:
"I think the most interesting thing to watch in the next Congress is how many Democrats start voting with us. Every one of the 23 Democrats up in the next cycle has a clear understanding of what happened Tuesday. I think we have major opportunities for bipartisan coalitions to support what we want to do." --Mitch McConnell quoted on NBC.com, 4 November 2010
"When your opponent states clearly that 'our number 1 job in the next two years is to make sure you don't have a second term — our number 1 job is to defeat you and to embarrass you,' you don't respond with Kumbaya." – Michael Moore on WNBC, 3 November 2010
When following a link to this video of Rand Paul supporters assaulting an anti-Paul protestor, I got the following message page from YouTube. There's no sex or profanity (though the actions of these thugs against Lauren Valle are obscene, and should be out of place in any democratic society), so I assume that the members of the YouTube user community who have flagged the following video have done so purely for political purposes.
If you didn't receive it in your email this morning as a card-carrying member of the Michael Moore Brigade, then you might also be interested in reading "A Boot to the Head ... from Michael Moore" on his website in which he places these brownshirt street tactics in a wider perspective. We're all going to get kicked, figuratively if not literally (though literally is always a possibility), if we let the pre-election pollsters be proved right next Tuesday night.
BECK: "Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? ..." TBL:Yes!
What's really scary is that these rightwingnut radio and television "personalities" have supporters and listeners who are even stupider and more violent than they are, and most of them are also armed. What if this jerk were expressing this same murderous fantasy about an "activist judge" or Bill or Hillary Clinton?
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
