TUNISIA, EGYPT, LIBYA... ISRAEL?
Raving reporter Max Gross accepts an offer from the Xenox News executive committee to reluctantly write another drunken spray. The price? A case of imported Moskovskaya Osobaya vodka. The fishing was good but how could he refuse!
OK then, brothers and sisters, local and global events are hot, harried and horrible, as usual.
But honestly Ed, I'd have written something sooner, only I've been gagging for weeks now, up-chucking, hurling, technicolour-yawning and chundering in the South Pacific sea.
Blatant, rampant hypocrisy and state-sponsored butchery does that to me.
It's fecking exhausting and the catalyst is ceaseless. Not even the vodka spritzers help alleviate my nausea.
Must stop watching the lamestream infotainment that claims to report current affairs news. But... know thy enemy.
Still, if you're into black humour, there's laughs to be had, as in dickhead dictator Gaddafi's proclamation that those Libyans organising to oust him are "terrorists".
Nice one, George Dubya Asshole: you've legitimised state terrorism, world-wide. Got critics? Slap the "terrorist" label on them.
From the spark - literally - lit in Tunisia last December when 27-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi soaked himself in petrol and set himself on fire to protest the constant bullying and systemic corruption of government officials, a succession of Arabic autocracies have reeled, gob-smacked, as "the Arab street" took to the street to demand democratic reform and fundamental change. No marines, hunter-killer drones or desperate, dumb-ass, low-rent, trailer park, teenage cannon fodder required. Ordinary folk are storming the temple and booting out the money lenders.
This is the kind of change that Barack Obama has failed to deliver to the American people because of the obstructionist, irrational, all-but-insane Repuglican party.
Exasperated Mr Bouazizi died, as did hundreds of others who were - and continue to be - inspired by his enraged and courageous self-sacrifice. And they continue to die while we watch. Is CSI on tonight?
Meanwhile, that global paragon of free speech, free market and freedom fries, the Mutated Snakes of Duhmerikkka, is shocked and awed by the audacity of pissed-off folk living under the yoke of dictatorial US client states across the Middle East (oh how we love Oriental-ism, knowing nothing, being nowhere, caring... nothing).
Unlike our political and corporate bosses, Bouazizi didn't just talk the talk, he acted, desperate, nowhere to turn for justice or recognition, showing the blithe world that the urge for justice, fair play and equality are not the sole preserve of those phony, self-appointed guardians of democracy in insular, lobby-driven Washingtoon.
Bouazizi and Tunisia apparently kick-started the Arabic uprising against regional despots, a deep held desire that was always there, always simmering and now threatening US "interests' (aka global economic and military reach).
The two-faced US and expansionist, militant, neo-fascist Israel - an artificial construct and failed state (Bite me!) - are spooked by this spontaneous grass roots Arabic surge for real change, with its implicit rejection once and for all of US foreign policy with its mask, its black ops, black sites and its violent history of black slavery.
Democracy, as history shows, is what you make it.
Feck the Monroe Doctrine: USA today, gone tomorrow. Rancid on the outside, worm-ridden and crumbling within. Whew, and you were wondering what that dreadful smell was! Dead dog? Dead scruples.
Funny thing though. When lame-duck President Obama - CHANGE! - pumped taxpayers' money into propping up the blatantly corrupt monster financial institutions responsible for the Global Financial Crisis - "too big to fail" - you'd expect Americans to rise up just like Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and other down-trodden Arab citizens. After all, millions of homes were called in by the bloodless banks, jobs disappeared, and ordinary folk watched the bastards responsible walk away in triumph with enough loot and influence to do it all again.
My fellow Americans, cast aside your mindless TV sitcoms, arise from your armchairs and ride-on lawn mowers, boycott McDonalds and Fox News and fight for genuine US democracy.
Yes, you can!
And so, to Egypt, where that unrepentant creep Mubarak helped Israel crush Palestinian hopes of sovereignty and provided the USA with torture facilities.
Christ, it took until bloody Mubarak was safely ensconced in Sharm El Sheikh and ordinary Egyptians were prematurely congratulating themselves in Tahrir square, before Obama (CHANGE!) squeaked up and mumbled some cynical rhetoric about democracy in Egypt. Oh no, he and his minders were privately wailing, what the hell will we do if we don't have a pliant Egyptian dictator. He's one of our main men!
And Bahrain, where the USA maintains a massive naval base for its Fifth Fleet, critical for US control of the Arabian Gulf. Why? Almost two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and 45 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves are in the Gulf region. Oh duh!
(As an aside, can you name another nation that has hundreds of miltary bases scattered around the world?)
And Yemen, another autocracy paid and bought US client, where people are demanding basic rights that we lazily take for granted here in the enlightened, benighted, dumbed-down "West".
And Saudi Arabia... Well, if you can't see the grisly links there by now then you should just roll over and go back to sleep (Hint: the 9/11 suicide loonies were all Saudis bar one).
And once again in Iran, the current convenient pariah, according to the US power elites and their suck-hole proxies around the world (If only the faux "Communist threat" was still around!). Ordinary people risk life, limb and future, hoping for "change" that President Obama - and the rest of us - can only imagine.
Unthinkable, isn't it? Iranian citizens who long for freedoms we rightfully assume but who reject US impositions, threats and kick-backs! No more US BBBB (Bullying, Blackmail, Bribery and Bullshit). Viva la revolucion!
In what may seem an entrenched and bifurcated world, there is always a THIRD WAY.
And so to Libya, as if a novelty, suddenly the subject of faux outrage as the Obama White House and Gaddafi's other Western supporters miraculously discover their moral scruples and meekly, reluctantly call for democracy, for the people, by the people...
Can you believe this fecking bullshite?
Each one of these dictatorial Middle Eastern autocracies has been funded, feted and utilised by the USA, the UK, France, the dead USSR and other freedom-loving democracies in Europe and - bucket please! - Down Under. For DECADES!
AAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!
Has been?
Sweet labial lips, get this: while that nimrod UK PM Dave Cameron, was pontificating about the violence in Libya - ''appalling and unacceptable'' - he was heading a delegation of salivating Pommy arms dealers to Cairo. And in Dubai, another fifty British arms firms led by a junior defence minister were touting WMD at the Middle East's biggest arms fair, flogging Brit fighter jets, APCs, tear-gas grenades, stun guns and rubber bullets.
The very tools used by rotten pricks like Mubarak and Gaddafi to crush the Arab street.
Oh, the unending sick, sick, sick circus!
Joining protests in Iraq against the US sponsored, post Saddam regime, Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, the bloke who threw his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush during a last-ditch Presidential P.R. exercise in 2008, was arrested by 'security forces" in Baghdad Thursday for urging people to rally for better services and governance. Hell, al-Zaidi's only crime was him missing the Shrub and for using just his shoes.
And did you ever wonder why that nasty old reprobate was brought to trial, convicted in a kangaroo court and killed so swiftly with nary a peep from the US government and the money men than run it? Ah yes, what fascinating insights into Iraq/US relations might Saddam have provided should he have lived. WikiLeaks, please?
Oops, no, the "democratic" USA has called for the murder of the public face of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. As if killing Assange will kill WikiLeaks and others devoted to exposing the lies our "leaders" shower us with. (Interesting how the Poms will extradite Assange but mollycoddled that old mass murderer Pinochet!)
And then there was Saddam's "threat" to dump the mighty US dollar as the global foreign exchange icon. Ah, yes! Think about that... especially now that the US economy has tanked.
And so, in Iraq, blessed with democracy at the sharp end of US cruise missiles, depleted uranium shells, bunker-busters and just plain old gung-ho, ignorant, numb-nut, shoot-to-kill US cannon fodder, there have been approx. 109,000 reported deaths as a result of Bush/Cheney invasion (This website monitors the awful truth: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/. And this here is just some of the awful truth that the US want to suppress: http://collateralmurder.org/).
As for Afghanistan, we're closing in on a decade of overkill that seems to have no end.
WTF! It didn't take this long to vanquish Hitler's Nazi onslaught that threatened to devour Europe and Russia and caused more death and destruction than anything every Bin Laden and Al Q'aida wannabe on Earth could even imagine (And the US made a mint out of that horror show too).
And just this past few weeks, US "military operations" killed 65 innocent people, including 22 women and more than 30 children, in the remote mountains of north-eastern Afghanistan.
Jesus-on-a-stick, and on it goes... Are we all fecking mad?
And just to drop a rotten cherry on top of this shit pile, here's something you may have missed, it was a little, tucked-away article.
But the implications are huge. And grotesque.
You do remember Iraq? Remember Saddam Hussein? Remember Weapons of Mass Destruction? Remember Imminent Threat? Remember Curveball?
Remember anything, any time, anywhere? What's the score?
Well, here's a belated and all but hidden news filler:
"Defector admits he lied to help topple Saddam"
That drip drop was in the Melbourne "Age" a couple of weeks ago. It should have been front page news. Big fecking headline. But no...
The Iraqi desperado code-named ''Curveball'' had insisted that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, contrary to all available US spy satellites, surveillance and (cough!) intelligence. Few took him seriously.
Then along came Dubya and his wagon train, yee-HAH, get along l'il doggy!
Curveball lied. And his German minders knew it. And they said so to the Yanks. And the Bush league polished this turd and milked it for all it was worth.
This bullshite was part of the US con-job "justifying" destroying Iraq and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people. Mr Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi told Germany's secret service that Iraq had mobile bioweapons trucks and had built clandestine factories. All utter bullshite.
But the grotesque farce doesn't end there. No way! Permit me to quote, at length, Bouthaina Shaaban, nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, who wrote this incisive piece a few days ago for Dubai's Gulf News:
"...neo-conservatives are popping up their heads, which have been crowned by the shame of wars and torture, to claim that they "have been right" all along.
The occupation and despotism guru Elliott Abrams wrote more than once claiming that "democratic transformation started in Iraq", which was left devastated with millions of its people carrying the scars of civil strife, division and massacres.
Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice also wrote and claimed that she was vindicated, not in terms of what she said, but in terms of what she did, including support of Israeli occupation, the war on Iraq and Lebanon, torture in Abu Ghraib and paying lip service to the rulers who supported Israel's war against Lebanon and Gaza.
Rice took part in making decisions which perpetuate Israeli oppression of millions of Palestinians. She took part in destroying Palestinian democracy. Today, she and the creators of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the symbols of war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the supporters of despotism and corruption, shamelessly claim that they supported "the spread of democracy in the Arab world".
These people don't want to understand that the democratic revolution in the Arab world is, at heart, a response to American suppression of Arab freedom in Palestine and Iraq and the unlimited support they have been giving to the ugliest form of racist occupation in human history.
Only days ago, Hillary Clinton, war criminal Rice's successor in the fight against Arab liberation from Israeli oppression, said that "Security Council resolutions are not the right way to make progress towards the two state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict".
The next day Clinton discovered that the "solution" she is promoting means "vetoing" a resolution, a mere unbinding resolution at the Security Council to denounce colony building.
The conscience of the Arab revolutionaries for freedom, in Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere, has been formed in campaigns of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for salvation from Israeli brutality, and in the movement opposed to the American invasion of Iraq and the brutal Israeli blockade of Gaza."
Ah, Gaza! More on that in a sec.
Yep, as always, the good ol' USA vetoed an Arab resolution before the UN Security Council condemning continued Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The standard US M.O.
US ambassador Susan Rice said Washington had ''regrettably'' chosen to oppose the resolution, sponsored by some 130 countries and backed by the Palestinian leadership.
She reassured everyone that the veto - the first by the Obamanites at the UN - should not be taken as US support for settlement building. HA HA HA! Where's that bucket?!
The 14-1 vote on the resolution, in which the US stood alone against the rest of the security council, including Britain, Germany and France. Sickeningly, the US voted in contradiction of its own policy. So what's new, you ask. Ask the citizens of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
The Arab street has been watching and listening to the "West's" blatant hypocrisy, double/triple/quadruple standards for many decades now. They know that evil smell.
And militant Zionists and religious Hassidic extremists are pooping their pants.
Because if a courageous peoples' popular uprising can overthrow US-sponsored tyrannies in Tunisia, Egypt, etc., then Gaza and the West Bank must be next in line.
Inside Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and throughout Arab countries that host large Palestinian refugee populations, Palestinians are pleading for recognition, safety, justice and democratic reforms.
And if Mubarak can be toppled, then why not Netanyahu? It's all one big oppressive shitburger.
So, brothers and sisters, a new form of democracy may be taking root (Mmmm, root!) in Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus and - inevitably - the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Let' say it again: Democracy is what you make it. Even the insular Yanks should be able to acknowledge that.
Meanwhile, men, women and children, young and old, are dying in desperate pursuit of a basic ideal that US citizens - and us right here in Monstralia - seem to have forgotten. Either that or we are all so crushed, so exhausted, by the power elites that we cannot move. Or think. Or LIVE! Really LIVE!
This was Max Gross for XenoXnews.com, gauging the waves, timing the tides and ... ah, feck it, human beings are insane. I'm going to the pub.
Then back to the beach.