by John Kendall Hawkins
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the [fill in the country] voters to be left to decide for themselves."
- Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace prize winner and war criminal
Ever since the Nobel Peace prize-winning President Barack Obama had the audacity to hire as his press secretary someone with the forked-tongued name Josh Earnest (can you say, oxymoron?) back in 2014, I've given up on the hope that executive administrations will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ever again. Obama worked the Press. The uproarious Jonas Brothers drone joke, followed by the knee-slapping drive-by shootings of American citizens overseas a year later, turning Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16 year old son, into drone meat. Or the drone double taps: first their weddings, then their funerals. Get it? "They hate us more than they love life," whistleblower John Kiriakou once said. But keep pushing, and they'll write poetry to us, he continued.
Obama played Hollywood, bringing in the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, showing them 'classified' documents supporting the Administration's narrative describing what happened the night they took bin Laden out in Abbottabad, so that Kathryn Bigelow exclaimed after the meetings that ZDT would be a "journalistic" movie. No mention of the raid narrative's multiple versions (I counted at least 9). No consideration of what Abbottabad neighbors witnessed that night. No mention that the classified documents Bigelow's team were shown, aside from legal questions such showing raised, were overclassified, or that her movie had superstition triggers -- a black cat crossing, and omen birds flying off, as terrorists arrive. WTF?
Scheduled to be Obama's October Surprise lift before the 2012 election, journalists, like Glenn Greenwald, criticized Bigelow's easy access, comparing her work to Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propaganda filmmaker, who directed Hitler's Goy Pride flick, The Triumph of the Will. ZDT was released in December instead. Obama didn't get the raised limp fish treatment from the Lefties at any red-and-black rallies following his squeaky victory, but ZDT won Oscars, which is something Leni never did, and Barry probably saw with rolling eyes his name in the movie's rolling credits.
Obama played his basket of implorables -- those who hoped and prayed for change in a country they saw free-fallin in its own democratic footprints: the hypnotic illusion that they owned a government for and by the People was wearing off. But for a little extra gangsta bounce in his step, he paid back all the Lefties who had barracked for his presidency by b*tch slappin' them, like a Billy Dee Williams blaxploitation pimp, until even Black Agenda Report pundits shook their heads, noting, "in 2008, it was Obama who opposed any moratorium on home foreclosures," and he who helped "shield corporations from class action suits, and voting against caps on credit card Interest." BAR threw up their hands and called him "The More Effective Evil." Read it and weep. O my aching heart.
Josh Earnest's arrival was a punchline appointment that even Karl Rove, who GW Bush affectionately nicknamed Turd Blossom, would have guffawed at.
The Bush advisor and dirty trickster, who famously went to war with "reality-based thinking," (and then denied it, coyly) almost torpedoed Obama's reelection in 2012, according to Greg Palast, who writes in How Trump Stole the 2020, that had Palast and a law professor not filed a midnight suit in Ohio, the votes of thousands of early Black voters were set to be "disqualified":
Turdblossom Rove knew...that if Husted disqualified about 20% of the early-voting "absentee" Black ballots on technical grounds, Rove would realize his last, best hope of defeating Obama (and defeating the voters). Fritakis went to court, I went on air, and the mass disqualification of Ohio votes--which worked the trick in 2004--failed in 2012. Barely.
As Palast asks: Who needs Russians to interfere in our processes?
Even Trump has gotten in on the narrative game, seemingly making fun of the Obama Administration's setup of the bin Laden take down narrative. Raise your hand, like a man, if you think the al Baghdadi-Idlib ISIS takedown narrative was a tweak at the Obama administration. There's plausibility out there that Obama was sitting on bin Laden, and had the raid lined up many months in advance as a cash-in for the October before the 2012 election. Trump's hasty, impromptu gathering of growls and grumps for a photo-op after Idlib looked like a lampoon of that now-iconic shot of the Obama cartel concerned in the situation room. Helmet cameras suddenly malfunctioned, coincidentally around the time an Apache raid-copter was said to have crashed and exploded.
John Brennan, despite having claimed to have been present for live updates of the raid, came out of that situation room and lied with his bald face to the Press, claiming bin Laden had been in a fire fight with SEALs and, when they broke down his door, he was clutching at least one of his wives and held a gun, "like a coward." Brennan had to walk and talk it back the next day, and was none too happy about it. It didn't mesh with the C-in-C's narrative.
Compare that to Trump's description of al-Baghdadi as "whimpering and crying," clutching kids, "and dying like a dog." The President laughing his ass off when, much to the ISIS head's chagrin, no escape tunnel was there after all, said Trump with glee. Even the chopper footage looked like a vague tweak of the Wikileaks Collateral Murder posting. Trump wasn't there, and nobody described the scene that way. Brennan's the guy, if you'll recall, who's security clearance Trump had snatched after the ex-CIA head kept snarking at Trump on TV -- as a paid consultant. It's like someone had sat Trump down with Turd Blossom's Reality Bashing for Dummies, and DJ went to town with the concept.
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