Politcal self-preservation. This is the opening volley of the next presidential election. Maybe the Republicans can outdo Obama with some tanks, whoops, those were just sent to Afghanistan the secret war.

Once again, John Caruso is seeing evil where there's none. The truth is much more innocent. Obama will soon appear with Bibi Netanyahu on Dancing With the Stars. Their dance routine will end with Obama giving Bibi a big, nice blowjob. And so Obama has been practicing that routine with Bibi ever since he was elected. Give the guy a break. He's just implementing the Democratic platform.

There was enough room? I'm quite surprized.

Well, Netanyahu has a gigantic asshole. Oh, wait, is a gigantic asshole. At least one of those two, anyway.

This is the respective satire by Ami Kaufman: http://972mag.com/izzie-in-holyland-part-16-a-phone-call-to-remember/

With this kind of "punishment" for their crimes, the Israelis should probably invade more countries. It is very profitable.

Wow, Obama should be awarded the Noble Peace Prize. Oh, wait....

Obama couldn't wipe Netanyahu's ass on a good day. I'd much rather have Ben as a leader, than what we got now. Someone got the best of that deal, huh? Was it us? Lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way...

Y'know what I do when someone says "Lead, follow or get out of the way? ...I obstruct!

Them yutzs just got the DISCOUNT price cause, a) they gots a back yard full of that shit from DECADES of US(U&I) sudsidies. b)That crap IS mass produced and over priced. C)(hint: Its ONLY worth 3 billion dollars to YOU THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER.)

This like complaining that Alabama is receiving federal funds...it's all functionally one system. Why the endless surprise?

As has been said, this cannot be parodied. It cannot even be really. . . complained about. Seriously:

That's 3 billion that the U.S. taxpayers don't have, but we only don't have that money because the U.S. government stole it from us, so pointing that out is a little. . . pointless.

This all is. . . it’s like saying the guy who murdered your family and raped your best friend and burned down the suburb in which you lived -- also stole your TV before escaping.

Except multiply all of that by about a million times more evil.

Our aristocracy murders and betrays so much that a mere betrayal of a couple billion dollars that will provide for more murder is downright quaint.

Ah, I do have something though. I’ve noticed that jew-haters (I don’t like the term anti-semite for etymological reasons) are quick to claim jews control the media, but slow to complain that they control the U.S. Okay, obviously, the problem in the really-real world is that the aristocracy of Israel, which is not likely to be filled with religiously faithful individuals, has hired parts of our own aristocracy as employees -- but that’s pretty nuanced a description for an American, even less a racist conspiracy-lover. Still, it’s odd that the fringe won’t claim that jews run _everything_, unlike, say, the Bavarians or the Freemasons, or, God bless ‘em, the Reptoids. Is there like a law in conspiracy delusions that claims you can’t use evidence of actual malice on a party to damn that party or its associates? Maybe it’s just too easy.

Obama must be a Carlin fan.

"It's the most dramatic illustration of abject US servility to Israel I can recall, and that's saying a lot."

Well, Israel is a satellite of the US, so I don't think the US is servile to them. It's really more the other way around, but of course there certainly is a symbiosis, and in a way Israelis and especially certain groups of Israelis benefit from the arrangement. Still, ultimately the whole thing screws Israel. Not as much as Palestine, of course, but the shots are being called thousands of miles from where the damage is being done.

The US may have wanted to "give" the Israelis the F-35s, but that kind of gift isn't really a gift.

Well, Israel is a satellite of the US, so I don't think the US is servile to them. It's really more the other way around, but of course there certainly is a symbiosis, and in a way Israelis and especially certain groups of Israelis benefit from the arrangement. Still, ultimately the whole thing screws Israel. Not as much as Palestine, of course, but the shots are being called thousands of miles from where the damage is being done

Really?

Been reading them wikileaks on this subject. My, but it's entertaining stuff.

Yes, those wikileaks docs sure are interesting, but these folks like King Abdulluh and Ehud Barak didn't end up where they are without, at a minimum, a generous helping of U.S. influence. We put in power or help put in power folks who call upon us to then have an even greater meddling influence in the region, but how different is that from the Czech government in 1968 inviting Soviet troops to give it a hand? The US is still the hyperpower dominating that region, and the Saudis and Israelis and just about all the otehr states in the region are still our client states. (Note that client states don't have to like each other.)

And I do think the whole situation is NOT in the interest of the people of Israel any more than it is in the interests of the people of other states in the region, probably especially Palestine though i think the other arab states are competitive with the Palestinians when it comes to injustice.

And I do think the whole situation is NOT in the interest of the people of Israel any more than it is in the interests of the people of other states in the region...

Let's agree to disagree. I don't think they're victimized by being pummeled with money, weapons or the unsolicited affection of the US CODELs.

If they were (victimized) they'd let us know.

Ain't in MY interests, and should WE boil it down to brass TAX, that's about ALL the interests I care about. Unfortunately, some folks in Washington D.C., MISTAKENLY thought I wanted TO PAY for these good folks, The Palestinians and The Israelis, to kill each other as some kinda twisted American version of a final solution. BUT I DON'T.

angryman

We're actually talking about different things--I'm not suggesting there aren't plenty of disgusting Israelis. There are, and they are controlling policy. My point is different, and you can certainly disagree, but I want it to be understood first. Plenty of Germans were Nazis, but that really wasn't too good for Germans in the end. The direction of Israel isn't good for Israelis, but it would be hard for Israelis to change the direction of their politics because their politics is so tied to our foreign policy. If all that oil in the region hadn't made the US military decide to adopt Israel for its own strategic reasons, I think the evolution of Israeli politics would have been different, which can be said of every other country in that area too. We've played a big role in screwing the region up, so I began by noting that I think it's really back-asswards to talk about Israel having such a big effect on US politics. It does, but not nearly as big an effect as we have on their politics.

Plenty of Germans were Nazis, but that really wasn't too good for Germans in the end.

Yeah, I don't really know what you're saying because you seem to think in the terms of Germans or Israelis as entities that deserve to be preserved. What's good for Germans. Good for Israelis. I couldn't give a sh*t about preserving their cultural and national identities, since I think that's fundamentally the problem.

To me it's just cheap nationalism. The value of a person as distinctly identified as German, or Israeli or American is pretty repulsive because it carries the connotation that certain groups carry more value than say, a refugee village indiscriminately shelled elsewhere.

But there is more to the back story of the Dec. 17 strike. It provoked a domestic uproar inside Yemen, spurred a parliamentary inquiry and prompted Amnesty International to send its own team to investigate on the ground. The group’s investigators concluded that the air strike, while killing 14 suspected militants, had largely killed women and children; the Amnesty team also came back with photographs that it said showed the wreckage of a U.S. made Tomahawk cruise missile and portions of unexposed cluster bombs — munitions that have sparked international attempts to ban their use because of their indiscriminate impact. Amnesty also noted in its report that when Yemeni parliamentary investigators arrived in the village of al-Majalah, they “found that all the homes and their contents were burnt and all that was left were traces of furniture.”

“The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible, particularly given the likely use of cluster munitions,” said Philip Luther, deputy director of Amnesty’s International Middle East and North Africa Program.

Just as unnoticed in the U.S. media was the degree to which images from the Dec. 17 strike in al-Majalah and the account of civilian casualties were used by al-Qaida. An al-Qaida video from last spring flashed images of civilians burned and mutilated in the attack and talked about how a U.S. cruise missile “poured its lava over al-Majalah Village” and scorched the bodies of women who were "baking bread for breakfast" in their homes.

On Monday, in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosure, an Amnesty International spokeswoman said the organization plans to renew its call for a U.S. investigation of the Dec. 17 air strike — a request that went unanswered when it released its report in June.

I highlight this because we are in the habit of ignoring articles like this yet they are strong evidence of our cultural relativism; I attribute it to ingrained racism, to cultural prejudice, to not giving a f*ck because we believe our system should prevail over theirs so grinding refugees into dust is ok when the tally is measured.

We could get into arguments on the value and contributions of Judeo-Christian civilizations, the beauty of German philosophy and poetry, the 6000 year tradition of moral philosophy that underpins our culture.

But let's not. Lastly:

...but it would be hard for ... to change the direction of their politics because their politics is so tied to our foreign policy.

Well, while it's "hard" for them, it's outright deadly for many others. I guess we should stay away from hard.

And who the f*ck is the "our" in "...our foreign policy". Me? CFR? Kissinger Associates? AIPAC? Goldman Sachs? Exxon/Mobil? Citizens United?

I don't have a f*cking foreign policy that involves arming genocidal f*cks.

A solution---STOP PAYING THEM.

" If all that oil in the region hadn't made the US military decide to adopt Israel for its own strategic reasons, I think the evolution of Israeli politics would have been different, which can be said of every other country in that area too. We've played a big role in screwing the region up, so I began by noting that I think it's really back-asswards to talk about Israel having such a big effect on US politics. It does, but not nearly as big an effect as we have on their politics."

I don't think it has to be an either/or thing here. It's true that the US has been screwing up the Mideast and we'd be doing that if Israel had never existed, but since Israel does exist, the Lobby does have a considerable effect in how precisely we go about screwing things up over there.

Also, Israel's root problem lies in the fact that they established a Jewish state with an act of ethnic cleansing. You could do that kind of thing in the 19th century and before and get away with it--it's the story of America and many other countries. But 1948 was a bit late for that sort of thing and the Palestinians have never had the grace to say "Okay, for sake of establishing a Jewish democracy we're happy to endorse our own ethnic cleansing." And the Palestinians weren't exterminated or reduced to a tiny fraction of the Jewish population. So a conflict was inevitable.

angryman

oh geez, more of that crap. You don't care more about people elsewhere than I do just because you enjoy public outrage. And I can fuckthis-fuckthat-fuckthis-fuckthat too, but I don't think you even tried to understand what I said because you were so into your righteous rant. And now that you have ranted without trying to understand what I mean, you still don't have a clue what I was getting at. That's probably okay, but letting those opportunities pass will add up over time.

That being said, I respect people who don't want to kill foreigners at all and think our foreign policy is murderous, so you get credit for that. Don't lose that part of it when you get sick of that anger not getting you much of anything.

...but I don't think you even tried to understand what I said because you were so into your righteous rant.

Dude, I've been reading your claptrap for years on ATR.

Your sensible apologetics are noted and duly disregarded. I usually just ignore you, but made the earlier mistake of addressing you directly upthread.

Donald Johnson

That all seems smart, though I'm not sure about the "bit late" part. We look at contemporary history from very close up, like flies on an elephant. We may be in the middle of trends we can't even recognize yet (hopefully not extinction, though we do seem to see that one). I think the Israelis are getting away with what they are doing for much the same reasons the US did against the American Indians--power. They can do it, and they want to, and their people rationalize it easily enough. No other nation really has a national interest sufficient to motivate it to take dramatic action. These wikileaks docs seem to show (again) what a bunch of phoney rhetoric the arab monarchs spew about everything--they don't give a damn about Palestinians or their own people or much else except keeping a good thing for themselves going. No nation really does care that much about Palestinians, which ironically is once the problem European Jewry had with such tragic results. But I don't mean to suggest this is limited to them. The same sort of "genocide" against the population of certain places still goes on in Central Asia and maybe parts of Africa too--ethnic groups being overrun by colonizing forces. So I don't this has really stopped, though I grant it has slowed. It seems to me that it may well start up again not too many decades from now when resource depletion and the costs of climate change introduce destabilization on a greater scale, and if things get tough enough, all hell could break lose in any number of places. That's why our Machiavellian grand strategists like Cheney and Kissinger and the Pentagon planners find it so easy to morally justify any damn loathsome thing they do--if you use 1% thinking like that described by Suskind, it's easy to think of yourself as heroically protecting a naive public and even the world from itself.

"though I'm not sure about the "bit late" part. "

That might be right and your point about what might happen in the near future with resource depletion kicking in is probably right. I just meant that Israel was born at the end of a several centuries long period of Western expansion at the expense of other people and partly because of the timing they haven't gotten away with it quite so easily as, say, the US did in the past.

yeah, what you said was smart, and i should have stopped there.

Q. How many colonized countries does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. None. They contracted that out to American businesses.

Anyway, the real question is how Israel is going to spin Saudi Arabia's support of bombing Iran, considering they are their example of the evil that "anti-Israel" people let slide.

angryman, you’re being a hypocrite here, to put it mildly:

And who the f*ck is the "our" in "...our foreign policy". Me? CFR? Kissinger Associates? AIPAC? Goldman Sachs? Exxon/Mobil? Citizens United?

I don't have a f*cking foreign policy that involves arming genocidal f*cks.

If you apply your logic to Israel, you come up with a sharp and clear distinction between the people-who-live-in-Israel (who include Arabs and other groups treated with racism) and the policymakers. Saying Israelis deserve destruction because of what Israel does is like saying you, I, and everyone in the U.S. deserve destruction because of what the U.S. does -- and that’s worthy of a serious “fuck you,” as you noted. You don’t get to slam the Israelis to a man or the German people to a man and leave out the U.S. Hell, the Israeli and U.S. governments are wholly owned by our common aristocracy and are obviously not democratic (especially the U.S.’) -- but Germany? Are you fucking kidding? Germany was, effectively, in the middle of a low-level civil war before the Nazis took over, a war that would have involved more people if so many Germans weren’t trying to learn to eat fucking shoe leather. The western powers as a whole are responsible for WWI and II, and fuck anyone with a rusty object who even implies that a random German citizen has even the hundreth of the blood on his hands that Wilson, Stalin, Truman, Hitler, Churchill et. al. have.

You can make the claim that the German citizen was responsible to a certain extent -- but that doesn’t tell you whether or not an individual citizen was responsible. The entire endeavor is morally pointless anyway since by no means are we addressing significantly democratic governments. A government whose people are ruled by famine, want, and ignorance isn’t democratic -- I don’t care how many elections they have.

By the way, you can say “fuck” here, especially when it comes to Israeli genocide. Fuckyity fuck-fuck-fuck.

NOOC: Sooooo, YOU are saying that YOU are ABSOLUTELY obligated to PAY for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, no matter what? Those Germans, back in WWII, couldn't choose between fighting back or sending their neighbors to the camps?

Third Party, Folks. Making excuses for the criminals, (dem or repub) and thinking WE can rehabilitate them some day is just magical thinking, it just gets US HERE.

NooC:

...Saying Israelis deserve destruction because of what Israel does is like saying you, I, and everyone in the U.S. deserve destruction because of what the U.S. does -- and that’s worthy of a serious “fuck you,” as you noted. You don’t get to slam the Israelis to a man or the German people to a man and leave out the U.S. Hell, the Israeli and U.S. governments are wholly owned by our common aristocracy and are obviously not democratic (especially the U.S.’) -- but Germany? Are you fucking kidding? Germany was, effectively, in the middle of a low-level civil war before the Nazis took over, a war that would have involved more people if so many Germans weren’t trying to learn to eat fucking shoe leather. The western powers as a whole are ...

NooC/NE/whoever: It certainly sounds like you set yourself a nice strawman there. I didn't say that Israeli's deserve destruction.

I said protecting a culture, or a geographical border constitutes nationalism, and I don't care for it there (or here). If I felt strongly about American exceptionalism, I'd be commenting at freeper central.

Let me simplify it for you: If they identify themselves as Germans, Israeli's or American's they're identifying themselves in terms of social ideology. I won't bother preserving that cultural ideology and it pains me when my tax money goes to violently uphold those ideologies.

But please do go ahead, and construct things I haven't said in order to make your argument fit. Carry on.

Angryman, thank you for reading my claptrap for years. I'm scaling back now, so I hope you find some better claptrap to brighten your days.

For DECADES WE have sent jets to the Israelis and small arms to the Palestinians in some sort of insane "effort to solve" this problem. I would suggest the problem could be solved if WE went ahead and bought 3 billion in machettes, (plenty for both sides, enough for ALL concerned) and spend a little extra for a few weeks of HATE RADIO. (I'm sure Rushbo would do the radio for just keeping his crack pipe full)