U.S. ELECTION: ELEPHANTS, ASSES & ASSHOLES

This sucker is going down!

Max Gross spreads the turd for Xenox News

With just a few days remaining before a few Americans cast their votes, the 2008 U.S. election campaign continues to bear all the hallmarks of the rogue Bush/Cheney Regime: fear, smear, deception, ignorance, triviality, phoney patriotism, schmaltz, aggression and racism.

That cynical old reprobate McCain probably thought “why not!”

It worked before, even if the Repuglicans did sabotage the vote count in what can o­nly be described as a coup in 2000 and a con in 2004.

And with Repuglicans concentrating their dying efforts o­n disenfranchising as many potential U.S. voters as possible, the outcome is by no means certain.

But an attempt in October to invoke some of that good ol’ 9/11 feeling by provoking Syria into violent reaction - slaughtering 8 of its citizens in a brazen attack o­n Syrian soil - has failed to boost the Repuglican cause at home.

Not the first time U.S. forces have – like Israel – attacked Syria (In June 2003, for example, a “Special Ops” team in Iraq crossed into Syria during a bungled U.S. mission that killed some 80 people) but by now the flavour in that stale old lollipop is all sucked out.

Still, if there’s o­ne thing about Dubya, he can’t help flogging a dead horse, apparently desensitised to the stench of rotting flesh due to the fact that he is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans.

Hellova job, George!

Let’s remember that way back in 2000, the constipated presidency of the Crawford dullard was floundering for direction and going nowhere very, very slowly.

Then there was 9/11 and suddenly “the gloves were off” as national sovereignty, Geneva Conventions, democracy and the U.S. Constitution itself were flushed down the toilet in a eruption of bloody diarrhoea by the gleeful Bush/Cheney goon squad in this golden opportunity to get away with a shitload of treasure and murder – mass murder - literally.

Yet the United States IS a signatory to the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, which outlaws inflicting "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental". Such practices are also a crime under U.S. federal law.

But then, laws don’t apply to the untouchable Bush/Cheney oligarchs.

U.S. creep Veep Cheney, the "vice-president for torture", demanded that the C.I,A. be exempted from a ban o­n "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of kidnapped detainees. Former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, may have had command responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib, but Cheney is ultimately responsible.

Still, ALL U.S. officials - no matter their rank or position - who took part in, "ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited ill-treatment against detainees in US custody", MUST be indicted for aiding and abetting war crimes.

Not to mention the many unanswered questions that remain about the Bush Regime’s activities before, during and after the September 11 2001 atrocities, in particular the reasons why the threat from Al Qaeda was ignored despite repeated warnings - both from within the intelligence community (including from National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke and former C.I.A. Director George Tenet) as well as from the intelligence agencies of numerous governments (including Argentina, Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Russia and… Afghanistan under the Taliban!) - that Bin Laden would strike the U.S. that summer.

Even that blithering idiot Rumsfeld later conceded that "there were lots of warnings."

Sure there were. The Bush Regime simply chose to ignore them all for purposes that quickly became all too clear.

The mushroom cloud over Manhattan was the neo-con smoke signal for rampant bloody plunder, domestically as well as abroad.

The subsequent return of a revamped McCarthyism was pure gold for these opportunistic, self-serving corporate gangsters. The life and liberty of others means nothing to them. Millions of ordinary Iraqis know that all too well.

A genuine and concerted investigation into 9/11 is essential in order to understand the evil neo-con catastrofuck years that were spawned that day.

Yet with impeachment “off the table”, what hope is there for justice to prevail?

The eunuchs of the Democrat-held Congress have refused to respond to the nation’s – indeed, the world’s – demand for justice to be seen, heard and enforced. Why would they? They are part and parcel of the same entrenched corrupt system where “trickle down” economics still rules, even while the free-marketeering Emperor staggers naked down Wall Street and millions of Americans lose their jobs and their homes.

We can expect Bush to retire in impunity to his preferred comfort zone in Crawford, Tex-ass, and the rest of the leeches to crawl off to their various corporate, military-industrial burrows and extremist, neo-con sewer pipes to collate their blood-soaked squillions.

They will get some hack to ghost write their bogus memoirs – ah, the golden years! – while millions of innocent men, women and children around the world continue to suffer and struggle as a consequence.

One thing is obvious: not a single action by the Bush regime has resulted in reducing acts of “terrorism” around the world. In fact, the main effect of overt U.S. militarism has been an overwhelming opposition to and suspicion of the U.S. in general.

The Bush/Cheney hydra has given terrorists everything they could ever hope for.

Global anti-Americanism is the legacy of George W. Bush, the "most dangerous and incompetent" U.S. president ever.

Oh, that and the global economic meltdown (GEM).

Here in Melbourne, Down Under, development is expected to come to a full stop, with commercial building projects worth billions of dollars frozen by the GEM.

The U.S. crisis in international debt markets has also hit property sales. Industry-wide retrenchments are o­n the cards.

And the commodities boom that has sustained Australia’s economy throughout the shameful, slipshod Howard years – easy money! – is slowing due to the GEM effect o­n China, our best customer. In Western Australia, the beating heart of the mining boom, projects are being postponed and jobs cut. We Aussies can’t sell shit if nobody buys shit.

But the U.S. generated shit storm keeps a-blowing.

Now, in its final notorious act of theft, the Bush/Cheney kleptocracy is urging banks to merge with o­ne another, ensuring that the o­nly financial institutions remaining will be "too big to fail," and that public interest is shackled to private-for-profit corporations in this phoney fiscal “bail-out”. There’s no fucking end to it!

So, as national economies reel, punch drunk and bleeding thanks to “globalisation” (aka Americanisation), the profligate Bush Regime is turning the state into a giant insurance agency for rapacious Wall Street speculators – “a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who need it most”, as Naomi Klein so accurately puts it.

And as for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, they will continue to bury their dead and mourn, cursing America for inflicting and then dismissing their agony.

Until the key players in the Bush/Cheney matrix are brought to account for their numerous domestic and international crimes and misdemeanors, the U.S. will remain a global pariah, suspected, untrusted and without any moral authority or credibility as a leading democracy.

A 21st century rogue state, not to be feared but universally condemned.

Over to you, Obama.

And lastly, to my American friends, I ask this as you attempt to cast your votes in that fundamentally flawed electoral process: remember who has been pissing in your drinking water for the past 8 years.

This was Max Gross for Xenox News, watching the time, counting the crimes and priming the freezer with another bottle of vodka.