Try to imagine the media firestorm if a leader of an radical Islamic militia group — caught on video with a roomful of people swearing allegiance to al-Qaeda — had appeared with Barack Obama at a press conference during his 2012 election campaign. Try to imagine the ferocious uproar if Obama had a business partner who backed ISIS-linked Islamic militants trying to overthrow a democratically elected leader. The scandal would be off the scale: investigations, denunciations, impeachment hearings — 24/7 pandemonium. Yet as Allan Nairn reports, this is precisely, exactly the case with Donald Trump, and we hear — nothing.

In this piece from Huffington Post, we find the views of an actual expert on WMD, someone who doesn’t actually profit from war and weapons like the “experts” paraded across the media in the last week. It is interesting to note that 1) the initial eye-witness accounts of the victims of the attack do not correspond to the use of weaponized sarin gas, cited as the reason for directly attacking Syrian positions; and 2) the entire narrative has been driven by al Qaeda, whom the Western news media is now treating as the most credible source of information in Syria,

Well, I reckon our bipartisan, war-loving political-media establishment won’t let any Russkie connections bring Trump down now! He has suddenly become “presidential”: the NYT story on the Syria strike was full of respectful, anonymous insider hagiography the like of which we haven’t seen since the paper’s reverent 2012 account of Obama’s weekly “kill list” meetings, which evoked St Thomas Aquinas to describe a group of men checking off names of “suspects” to be assassinated in a secret, arbitrary, unaccountable “extrajudicial” process. Of course, in his first days in office, Trump has already killed hundreds of civilians in Iraq and Syria

So Donald Trump has finally found a way to make liberals like him: make noises about “doing something” in Syria. (“Something” aside from the past few years of US intervention: bombs, drones, troops on the ground, billions in arms and funds to the rebels, etc.) After Trump said atrocity pictures “changed his mind” about Syria and he and his crew started talking tough, leading liberal blogger Digby said: “Somebody seems to have temporarily talked some sense into the administration.” Maybe it was General McMasters. You know, the NatSec honcho (accused of war crimes in Iraq) praised on Wednesday for removing

Even if they unearth videotape of Trump in bed with Putin – or with Putin’s dog – and remove him from power, the vicious, nasty, little racist cretin Jeff Sessions will still be in office, doing untold damage. He is now leading an aggressive crusade to “untie the hands” of militarized, brutalizing police forces across the country — especially the ones who have been slapped with federal restrictions for their confirmed, egregious, endemic, systematic racism. Sessions wants to set them loose on the uppity darkies who stir up the ancestral ghosts in his slavers’ blood and trouble his dreams with

To mark the anniversary of the onset of the launching of the horrific war crime against Iraq, I’m reprinting a piece I wrote a month after the invasion. The question examined here is still being asked of our leaders; and regardless of party or ideology – or even Nobel Peace Prizes – they all keep giving the same answer. The Karamazov Question Variation on a theme by Dostoevsky “They have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I return my ticket.” Ivan Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov, Book Five, Chapter

The New York Times has a story about the consternation of a small town in rock-ribbed Trump country after one of its leading citizens, Mexican native Carlos Pacheo, was hauled off by armed immigration officers. The good townsfolk still “firmly believe” that “illegals” need to be deported, you understand, but it turns out that their long-time friend and public-spirited fellow citizen is one of the “good ones,” a special case for whom their hero in the White House should perhaps make a special exception. (I’m not belittling their desire to save their friend from deportation — more power to them

(Updated below)  History teaches us that there is only one sure way to defeat fascism: put millions of fascists in the ground. Let us hope that today’s “alt-righters” and “new nationalists” and all the seeping pustules of hatred — from the White House down to the nastiest, cringing anonymous internet troll — consider this historical lesson, so we don’t have to go through it again. But let them also know that if we do have to go through it again, then by God, that’s exactly where they’re going: into the ground. UPDATE: The reactions to this post — most of them