Sorry, Catholics, This Snotty Leftist Hacker May Be the Best Friend You Have Right Now

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Wikileaks, under the leadership of Julian Assange, has been publishing embarrassing leaked emails from the Clinton campaign for a number of weeks.

(This post will contain no links. Things are changing so fast, there isn't a lot of point. Go to Drudge for the latest. It will be up for at least the next few months.)

There have been so many devastating Wikileaks reveals that they threaten to drown each other out.

For Catholics, the most interesting revelations have been that Clinton operatives viewed faithful Catholics as enemies and set up two Catholic front groups to control and influence not only the Catholic vote but the direction of the Catholic Church itself.

In a free country with a free media, these leaks would be the lead stories every day on the major networks and on the front pages of every newspaper.

No one has denied their accuracy.

Instead, there has been almost a total mainstream media blackout.

A small exception was a report on CNN, where it was announced that if anyone read Wikileaks material without it being filtered through CNN, he might be breaking the law. 

And the content of the leaks themselves have shown the media to be completely in the tank for the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign.

If we had an honest government, many of the leaks would have prompted FBI investigations. Instead, the US government is now cracking down on Wikileaks and Assange to retaliate against them for releasing information that put the Clinton campaign in a negative light.

Does that make sense?     

Assange has been in sanctuary in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for the past four years. Technically, he's attempting to avoid extradition to Sweden (and then perhaps the United States) for accusations of sexual harassment that came up at precisely the most convenient (for his opponents) moment.

Does that sound familiar?

Take a good look at his face. He may not be long for this world.

In the last 24 hours his internet access (in the embassy) has been cut off, and they've acted against other alleged Wikileaks operators, attempting to block them as well.

The British government has also just acted against RT News. It is alleged (without any evidence that I know of) that Russia is the source for some of the Wikileaks material.

The US may have just launched, or be about to launch, a cyberwar with Russia to protect the Clinton presidential campaign.

Does that make sense?

So, fearing the worst, Wikileaks has apparently just activated its "dead man" switch, revealing a key to decrypt some of its most important data.

What does it all mean?

This isn't our country anymore.

And by "our", I'm not just referring to fellow faithful Catholics. Far from it. Faithful Catholics are just 1% (or whatever) of the current community of peasants. You better start making friends with some of the others.

The bad guys want to keep that boot grinding down.   

It's their country. Or they think it is. And they'll do anything to keep it that way.

Julian Assange is a snotty, leftist hacker.

But right now, he may be the best friend you have.

Tomorrow, he'll be you.

"I married Isis on the 5th day of May": The Last Word on Bob Dylan

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One of my go-to Bob Dylan songs is "Isis," the second track on his 1975 Desire. It's not political. It's not a protest song. I guess it would be classified as a ballad.

I just played it again for the 97th time.

What is it about? It's a tall tale set in a sort of mythical West about a grave-robbing scheme gone bad. Or something like that. But the story is framed by a a woman. She is enigmatic and perhaps unattainable even though the song begins with the narrator's marriage to her:

I married Isis on the 5th day of May
But I couldn't hold onto to her very long
So I cut off my hair and rode straight away
For the wide unknown country where I could not go wrong

There follow his adventures, which are a mix of the magical and the mundane. He comes to a  town, divided down the middle between "darkness and light" and goes into a laundry to wash his clothes.

He's taken in by a con man - "I gave him my blanket; he gave me his word" - and they go into the desert in pursuit of treasure. The narrator dreams of "diamonds and the world's biggest necklace." But he also can't get the woman out of his head:

I was thinkin' about Isis, how she thought I was so reckless
How she told me that one day we would meet up again

And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can't remember all the best things she said

After arriving at "the pyramid all embedded in ice," the plan goes bad. It turns out to be about a grave, but the grave ends up being that of the con man. And there is no treasure. Instead of a tomb robbery, it's a burial:

I picked up his body and I dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole and I put back the cover
I said a quick prayer and I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis just to tell her I love her

Of course he does.

She was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise

Blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
I came in from the East with the sun in my eyes
I cursed her one time then I rode on ahead

When she questions him, the narrator insouciantly snarls out his answers. Then he melts.

She said, where ya been? I said, no place special
She said, you look different, I said, well, I guess
She said, you been gone, I said, that's only natural
She said, you gonna stay? I said, if you want me to, Yes

Unless you've heard the original album version of this song, all of this may seem a bit silly. The lyrics were apparently written in collaboration with Jacques Levy, who was, yes, an actual Literature Professor. But I'm not sure they look anything special on the page.

As I type I smile at the words because I remember Dylan's take on them. On Desire, it was perfect, especially when coupled with four instruments including a haunting acoustic piano and fiddle.

There are a few different versions on YouTube of Dylan performing the song live. They're not very good. The intonations are all wrong. It sounds hurried. This tells me that the brilliance of the song lies not in the lyrics nor even in the lyrics coupled with the melody. It wouldn't have become a classic without the particular way the song was put together on Desire by Dylan and his producer, Don DeVito. Maybe DeVito should have won a Nobel Prize.

I hope "Isis" is listened to in a hundred years. I think it will be. It certainly deserves to be. And it's an example of what makes Bob Dylan one of the greatest American musicians of the second half of the 20th century.

No, it's not literature (for the reasons given above). But that's okay. I haven't read Proust 97 times. I haven't even read any particular passages of Proust 97 times.

Okay, I haven't read Proust.

As of this writing, the reclusive Dylan still hasn't responded to the Nobel Prize committee. Actually, I think it would be fitting it he snubbed the whole thing. He doesn't need the Award. it doesn't add one atom to any of his accomplishments. The Award was a silly suck-up to counter-cultural hipsterism (or an imagined version of it) by a bunch of muddle-headed academics who couldn't carry a beat and think sharia law is the height of diversity.

It doesn't matter.

Isis, oh, Isis, you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled

On the fifth day of May in the drizzlin' rain

Isis will endure forever. Or at least her smile will.

A Funny Palindrome Parody in Honor of Bob Dylan

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A palindrome is a word, phrase, sentence or longer string of sentences that is spelled the same way right to left as left to right.

You either like love palindromes or you don't. And if you do, you probably have a number committed to memory.

I have a pretty awful memory, especially when it comes to words and letters, but I could reel off palindromes at you for as long as it took you to slowly drink a pint.

Or fall asleep.

Here are some famous ones:

Madam, I'm Adam. 

Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!

And here are some slightly lesser known (but still quite fun) examples:

Sit on a potato pan, Otis. 

Semite Moses runs to Lot's nurse, sometimes. 

Go hang a salami - I'm a lasagna hog. 

The noon sex alert relaxes no one, H.T.

Here is my favorite whimsical short palindrome:

Elf farm raffle.

And so on.

Now consider Bob Dylan's famous "Subterranean homesick blues," especially his iconic short video of it from the film, Don't Look Back.

It's now almost fifty years old.

Weird Al Yankovic did a palindrome parody of it.

What could that possibly mean, you ask? You'll just have to see for yourself. Note, even if you have seen the Dylan short before, you should first re-watch the original two-minute video to appreciate the full effect of the parody. For full accuracy, Weird Al even temporarily resurrected Allen Ginsberg.

So, here's the original:

And here's the Palindrome version. It is of course called "Bob."

When a Young Robert Christgau Busted Bob Dylan's Literary Pretensions

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Bob Dylan was just awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.

This was, of course, a category error. Literature is defined as written works, composed of letters on pages, usually grouped together into books.

Bob Dylan only composed two literary works in his life:

Tarantula - a short book of prose poetry, published illegally by an underground press in 1966, bootlegged extensively and then released officially in 1971 - received almost uniformly condemnatory reviews, and is still cited as a classic example of how the "poetry" of the song lyric mode fails to transfer to the printed page.

Chronicles: Volume One - published in 2004 as the first part of a planned three-volume memoir - got a much better reception. But I think it's fair to say that Dylan didn't get the Nobel Prize for that.

So, Dylan won the Prize for his song lyrics, or more precisely, his songs. In fairness, the Nobel Committee along with many others no doubt consider them to be poetry - sung poetry, but poetry nevertheless.

But that doesn't make Blonde on Blonde literature.

And in truth, as music critic Robert Christgau wrote in a review of Tarantula published forty-five years ago in The New York Times, song-writing isn't poetry, and Dylan, for all his pretensions, is no poet.

Christgau called him a poetaster.

Ouch.

But he would also write: "To assert that Dylan doesn't belong to the history of literature is not to dismiss him from the history of artistic communication, of language." Exactly so. Whatever you think of Dylan's politics, or the people and movements associated with him, or his somewhat eccentric later creative life, he was a fine musician. I can only second the critic's final recommendation: Buy his records.   

The answer, my friends, is still blowin' in the wind 

By Robert Christgau June 27, 1971 

The official appearance of Bob Dylan's “Tarantula” is not a literary event because Dylan is not a literary figure. Literature comes in books, and Dylan does not intend his most important work to be read. If he ever did, his withdrawal of “Tarantula” from publication five years ago indicates that he changed his mind. Of course, it's possible that he's changed his mind again—with Dylan, you never know. Most likely, however, his well‐known quest for privacy, his personal elusiveness, lies behind the unexpected availability of this book. The pursuit of the artist by his audience has been a pervasive theme of his career, and the bootleg versions of “Tarantula” hawked on the street and under the counter over the past few years by self‐appointed Dylanologists and hip rip‐off artists were simply a variation on that theme. For Dylan to permit the release of the book now (at a non‐rip‐off price, it should be noted) is to acknowledge the loss of a battle in his never‐ending war for privacy. Quite simply, his hand has been forced by his fans. He is a book‐writer now, like it or not. 

To assert that Dylan doesn't belong to the history of literature is not to dismiss him from the history of artistic communication, of language. Quite the contrary. A song writer does not use language as a poet or novelist does because he chooses his words to fit into some larger, more sensual effect; an artist who elects to work in a mass medium communicates in a different way from one who doesn't and must be judged according to his own means, purposes and referents. That much ought to be obvious. I would also argue, however, that Dylan's choices not only merit their own critical canons but must be recognized as incisive responses to modernism's cul‐de‐sac, in which all the arts, especially literature, suffer from self‐perpetuating intellectual élitism. 

What makes this all so confusing is that Dylan's fame and influence are based on his literary talents and pretensions. Just for fun, I might suggest that Dylan is no greater an artist than Chuck Berry or Hank Williams, but only Dylan could have become the culture hero of a decade of matriculating college classes. Even at first, when Dylan's best songs were mostly acute folk music genre pieces, he was thought to embody transcendent artistic virtues. The standard example was “Blowin' in the Wind,” which interspersed straightforward political questions with metaphorical ones, always concluding: “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, the answer is Blowin' in the wind.” The song's “poetic” language, effective in its musical and emotive context even though it appears hackneyed on the page, captured listeners sympathetic to its apparent assumptions and inspired much unfortunate image‐mongering. But in retrospect we notice the ambivalence of the title—can the answer be plucked from the air? 

Dylan may not have been aware he was equivocating when he wrote the song, but that doesn't matter. Equivocation was inherent in his choice of method. Like most of his confreres in the folk movement, Dylan got his world‐view from the listless civil‐rights and ban‐the‐bomb radicalism of the late 50's but was forced to find his heroes elsewhere, among the avant‐garde artists who helped young post‐conformists define for themselves their separation from their fellow citizens. Once Dylan conceived the ambition to use those artists as his own exemplars, he had to come to terms with their characteristic perspective—namely, irony. Sure enough, in “My Back Pages” (1964) he was renouncing politics with a nice ironic flourish—“I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.” Moreover, the same song signalled his debut as a poetaster with a portentously clumsy opening line: “Crimson flames tied through my ears, growing high and mighty traps.” 

Between early 1964 and mid‐1966—a period that includes the four albums from “Another Side of Bob Dylan” to “Blonde on Blonde” and the switch from acoustic to electric music—Dylan became a superstar. Pioneers of youth bohemia seized upon his grotesque, sardonic descriptions of America as experienced by a native alien and elevated Dylan into their poet laureate. In response, professional defenders of poetry declared themselves appalled by his barbaric verbosity. Many of us, his admirers, even while we were astonished, enlightened and amused by Dylan's sporadic eloquence, knew why John Ciardi wasn't. But we didn't care, not just because Dylan's songs existed in an aural and cultural context that escaped the Ciardis, but because we sensed that the awkwardness and overstatement that marred his verse were appropriate to a populist medium. No one was explicit about this at the time, however, least of all Dylan, whose ambitions were literary as well as musical and whose relationship to his ever‐expanding audience was qualified by the fascination with an arcane élite to which his songs testified. 

“Tarantula” is a product of this period; in fact, Dylan fans who want a precise sense of what the book is about need only refer to the liner notes of “Highway 61 Revisited.” The basic technique is right there: the vague story, peopled with historical (Paul Sargent), fabulous or pseudonymous (the Cream Judge, Savage Rose) characters, punctuated with dots and dashes and seasoned with striking but enigmatic asides, all capped off with a fictitious letter having no obvious connection to what has preceded. That's all folks. 

“Tarantula” is a concatenation of such pieces. Most of them seem unconnected, although a few characters, notably someone named “aretha,” do recur. The only literary precedent that comes to mind is “Naked Lunch,” but in a more general way “Tarantula” is reminiscent of a lot of literature because it takes an effort to read it. Unless you happen to believe in Dylan, I question whether it's worth the effort, and don't call me a philistine—it was Bob Dylan who got me asking such questions in the first place. 

For the strangest aspect of Dylan's middle period is that although it was unquestionably his literary pretensions that fanaticized his admirers and transformed the craft (or art) of songwriting, Dylan's relationship to literature as a discipline was always ambivalent. In fact, to call it ambivalent is to compound the confusion—it was actually downright hostile. From “Tarantula”: “wally replies that he is on his way down a pole & asks the man if he sees any relationship between doris day & tarzan? the man says ‘no, but i have some james baldwin and hemingway books’ ‘not good enough’ says wally.” From the notes to “Bringing It All Back Home”: “my poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion.” 

Dylan borrowed techniques from literature—most prominently allusion, ambiguity, symbolism and fantasy—and he obviously loved language, but he despised the gentility with which it was supposed to be tailored. His songs do seem derivative, but (like “Tarantula”) they aren't derived from anyone in particular. Obvious parallels, or “influences”—Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Céline—share only his approach and identity: the Great Vulgarian, the Magnificent Phonus Balonus. Dylan wrote like a word‐drunk undergraduate who had berserked himself into genius, his only tradition the jumbled culture of the war baby—from Da Vinci to comic strips, from T. S. Eliot to Charlie Rich. His famous surrealism owes as much to Chuck Berry as to Breton or even Corso, and even though his imagery broadened the horizons of songwrit ing, it was only a background for the endless stream of epigrams—which songwriters call good lines—flowing into our language, some already clichés (“The times they are a‐changin,” “You know something's happening, but you don't know what it is”), others still the property of an extensive, self informed subculture (“Stuck in side of Mobile with the Memphis blues again,” “Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters”). Dylan may be a poor poet, but he is a first‐class wit. 

But such talk accedes to the temptation of placing Dylan's work in a page context, always a mistake. Literature may have engendered the Dylan mystique, but rock and roll nurtured it. We remember those lines because we've heard them over and over again, often not really listening, but absorbing the rhythm of unpoetic distortion just the same. “Tarantula” may contain similar gems, but we'll never know they're there, because Tarantula will never be an album. The wonderful letters, the funny bits, as well as the dreary, vaguely interesting stuff and the failed doomsday rhetoric—all will go. Aretha Franklin's continuing presence through the book is a portent, for shortly after “Tarantula” and “Blonde on Blonde” Dylan made another switch by abandoning the verbal play (and excess) of his long songs for brief, specifically pop works. For a while, it appeared that this meant a total abandonment of the complexity of his vision, but his latest album, “New Morning,” makes clear that it is only a condensation. More and more, Dylan affirms the value of the popular and the sensual over the verbal. This book will find its way into A. J. Weberman's Dylan concordance and doubtless become a cult item, but it is a throwback. Buy his records.

BOMBSHELL: Young Man Claims to be Trump's Abandoned Illegitimate Son; Also, DISGUSTING Video Surfaces of Trump Flaunting His Erection at Female Reporters

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I lied.

Or I sort of lied. Both things actually happened. It's just that Trump was not involved.

And of course I lied to make a point.

Things are different for Trump.

The alleged father of the young man was Bill Clinton.

And the person caught on video, making a lewd gesture by raising one of his legs and exposing his crotch to a captive audience of reporters (many of them female and at least one of them obviously uncomfortable) was none other than Barack Obama.

You can easily find these stories (and the video, if you wish) by looking at today's Drudge links or by a few seconds of Googling.

I assume you won't find them on any conventional or mainstream media outlets. Indeed, Drudge has just reported that CNN imposed a blackout on the Clinton story.

If Trump were involved, they would be the lead story on every network and on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

It's Trump supporters who are attacked by fascist mobs.

But (according to the media) it's Trump and his supporters who the fascists.

By the way, Billy Bush wasn't fired (or in the process of being fired, or whatever) from NBC for being caught laughing at sexist banter. He was fired for being caught with Trump.

Milo Yiannopoulos wasn't banned from Twitter for making fun of Leslie Jones. He was banned for suggesting that gays should vote for Trump.

And you weren't rejected for that job because you had a bad interview. Rather, someone in Human Resources checked your Facebook page and saw you wearing that "Make America Great Again" hat.

Things are different for Trump.

And things are different for you.

You think it's bad now?

Wait till she wins.

Debate Officials Threatened to Have Security Remove Clinton Rape/Assault Survivors

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Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick

The story is below, but let me first make two general points:

Given the actual facts of Bill Clinton's serial misogynistic behavior before, during and after he occupied the White House...

Given that his lying to investigators about one of his affairs - which included having sex in the oval office with someone who started out as an intern - plunged the government into an extended crisis involving only the second impeachment of a president in US history...

Given the credible claims that Hillary Clinton long acted as a collaborator and enabler, including threatening at least one (and probably more) of her husband's victims to keep quiet...

Any sort of inordinate focus on a secretly recorded tape of a boorish Trump moment, eleven years ago, released as a last-minute dirty trick...

Or any assertion, implied or explicit, of moral equivalence between the personal behavior of Trump and that of the Clintons - perhaps the premier American political mafia couple of modern times... 

Is utterly grotesque.

And the recent craven and disloyal reaction to the "crisis" by many Republican politicians has been utterly contemptible.

From The Washington Post:

Trump wanted to put Bill Clinton’s accusers in his family box. Debate officials said no. 

ST. LOUIS — Donald Trump’s campaign sought to intimidate Hillary Clinton and embarrass her husband by seating women who have accused former president Bill Clinton of sexual abuse in the Trump family’s box at the presidential debate here Sunday night, according to four people involved in the discussions. 

The campaign’s plan, which was closely held and unknown to several of Trump’s top aides, was thwarted just minutes before it could be executed when officials with the Commission on Presidential Debates intervened. The commission officials warned that, if the Trump campaign tried to seat the accusers in the elevated family box, security officers would remove the women, according to the people involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. 

The gambit to give Bill Clinton’s accusers prime seats was devised by Trump campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner, the candidate’s son-in-law, and approved personally by Trump. The four women — three of whom have alleged that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted or harassed them years ago — were to walk in the debate hall at the same time as the 42nd president and confront him in front of a national television audience. 

“We were going to put the four women in the VIP box,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who represents Trump in debate negotiations. “We had it all set. We wanted to have them shake hands with Bill, to see if Bill would shake hands with them.” 

The four women — Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Kathy Shelton — sat with other ticketed members of the audience. Bill Clinton long has denied the allegations of Jones, Broaddrick and Willey. Shelton was 12 years old when she accused a 41-year-old man of raping her. Hillary Clinton was selected by a judge to defend the man, who eventually pleaded to a lesser charge. 

Frank J. Fahrenkopf, the debate commission’s co-chairman and a former Republican National Committee chairman, caught wind of the plot on Sunday and immediately moved to put an end to it. Fahrenkopf tartly warned a Trump staffer that if the campaign tried to put the four women in the family box, security personnel would remove them, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversations. 

“Fahrenkopf said, ‘no’ — verbally said ‘no,’ that ‘security would throw them out,’” Giuliani said. 

That came shortly after commission officials told the Clinton campaign that they could not seat Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) with Bill and Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, in the Clinton family box. The discussions continued up until the debate programming began. 

After issuing his warning, Fahrenkopf and co-chairman Mike McCurry, a former Clinton White House press secretary, took the stage to make pre-debate announcements. 

At that point, the co-chairmen were not certain whether the Trump campaign would abide by Fahrenkopf’s order. A Republican strategist later said that it was only when Fahrenkopf saw Giuliani leading the women to other seats that he knew the campaign had backed down. 

Giuliani said Bannon kept pushing to have the women come out until three minutes before the debate began. 

“But we pulled it because we were going to have a big incident on national TV,” Giuliani said. “Frank Fahrenkopf stopped us, and we weren’t going to have a fight on national TV with the commission to start the debate.” 

Bannon declined to comment late Sunday, but his role in coming up with the idea was confirmed by multiple Trump campaign advisers. Senior Clinton campaign officials said they were unaware of the Trump campaign’s plans to try to seat the women in the family box. 

Giuliani was highly critical of Fahrenkopf in an interview after the debate Sunday and said the Trump campaign is considering asking for him to step aside before the third and final debate, scheduled for Oct. 19 in Las Vegas. 

Informed of Giuliani's comments, Fahrenkopf declined to respond. 

Giuliani said it was unfair that the commission has allowed Mark Cuban, a billionaire Trump tormenter and Clinton surrogate, to sit in the front row, but would not permit Bill Clinton’s accusers to sit in Trump’s family box. 

“In the first debate with Mark Cuban, Fahrenkopf said we’ll make a deal and everybody will [be able] to approve who’s in the shot, and if it’s not family, they have a right to object and we have a right to object,” Giuliani said. “So we object. But 10 minutes before that debate, he tells us he can’t do anything about Cuban sitting in the first row, that security can’t throw him out.” 

Giuliani said that experience led them to believe the campaigns could control their seats. 

However, the staging of the second debate differed from the first. 

In St. Louis, family members sat in an elevated box, while in Hempstead, N.Y., they were seated in the front row with other attendees. 

“The women were outraged,” Giuliani said. “They were in the holding room and ready to go. No one was pushing them. They volunteered. But I knew the minute we got pushback that we had gotten into their heads. [Hillary Clinton] was rattled. They were rattled.”

Shareef Didn't Like It: Amazon Pulls Sexy Burka Costume

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Happy Halloween!

Amazon UK just pulled the "Sexy Saudi Burka" costume from its online store, due to Muslim pressure and threats.

Here are some points, somewhat at random:

1. I don't know whether the sexy burka was available in the US. If it was, it was also pulled.

2. You can still buy the not very sexy male costume that the burka was paired with.

3. You have to laugh at the first item under "Customers Who Bought This Item (the Arab male costume) Also Bought":

4. You can of course still buy 101 different sexy nun costumes, as well as sexy priests (yes the costume exists), sexy angels and devils (obviously), multiple Jesus costumes with or without the "Thorn Crown Accessory" and all sorts of Biblical costumes, some sexy, some not, for everyone from irreverent atheists to Christian Fundies who want to have a holy Halloween.

5. Sorry, no Muhammad costumes, but you can buy a Muhammad Ali mask.

6. You can of course buy 101 non-sexy burkas from Amazon UK (many with velcro).

7. You CAN still buy an Israeli soldier costume for your child. Walmart pulled it last year after Muslim pressure and threats, but it's still available from Amazon US and UK. Note, though, the 117 one-star reviews out of 122. Obviously, a few Muslim and non-Muslim Brits did a bit of computer typing as a break from singing kill-the-jew songs.

8. You CAN still buy (in the US but not the UK) a bikini made out of the Saudi flag. It's part of the "Kim Lennon Country Series," which features bikinis made from many different flags. Act now, though. It's already acquired a few negative reviews from the usual suspects (in broken English, of course). As you know, the Saudi flag contains the Muslim statement of faith: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet." And sure enough, there it is.

"You're like, f**k this." The Obama/Clinton Policies in Syria Aren't a Failure, They're a Fraud

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Who are these guys, again?

I assume one of the reasons the Trump/Pence campaign isn't talking about this is because many Republicans themselves bought into the fraud and were even partly responsible for it, quickly identifying Assad as the primary villain in Syria and then continuing to double down on that beyond all reason.

From SOFREP News by way of Consortiumnews and Creeping Sharia:

US Special Forces sabotage White House policy gone disastrously wrong with covert ops in Syria (Jack Murphy, SOFREP News):

“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, 'Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’” 

“I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. A second Special Forces soldier commented that one Syrian militia they had trained recently crossed the border from Jordan on what had been pitched as a large-scale shaping operation that would change the course of the war. Watching the battle on a monitor while a drone flew overhead, “We literally watched them, with 30 guys in their force, run away from three or four ISIS guys.” 

How the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists ("Alistair Crooke", Consortiumnews): 

In a detailed report, US Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy gone Disastrously Wrong with Covert Ops in Syria, Jack Murphy, himself a former Green Beret (U.S. Special Forces), recounts a former CIA officer having told him how the “the Syria covert action program is [CIA Director John] Brennan’s baby …Brennan was the one who breathed life into the Syrian Task Force … John Brennan loved that regime-change bullshit.” 

Murphy states bluntly: 

“distinguishing between the FSA and al-Nusra is impossible, because they are virtually the same organization. As early as 2013, FSA commanders were defecting with their entire units to join al-Nusra. There, they still retain the FSA monicker, but it is merely for show, to give the appearance of secularism so they can maintain access to weaponry provided by the CIA and Saudi intelligence services. The reality is that the FSA is little more than a cover for the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra. … 

“The fact that the FSA simply passed American-made weaponry off to al-Nusra is also unsurprising considering that the CIA’s vetting process of militias in Syria is lacklustre, consisting of little more than running traces in old databases. These traces rely on knowing the individuals’ real names in the first place, and assume that they were even fighting-age males when the data was collected by CTC [Counterterrorism Centre] years prior.” 

Nor, confirms Murphy, was vetting any better with the 5th Special Forces operating out of Turkey: 

“[It consisted of] a database check and an interview. The rebels know how to sell themselves to the Americans during such interviews, but they still let things slip occasionally. ‘I don’t understand why people don’t like al-Nusra,’ one rebel told the American soldiers. Many had sympathies with the terrorist groups such as Nusra and ISIS.” 

Others simply were not fit to be soldiers. “They don’t want to be warriors. They are all cowards. That is the moderate rebel,” a Green Beret told Murphy, who adds: 

“Pallets of weapons and rows of trucks delivered to Turkey for American-sponsored rebel groups simply sit and collect dust because of disputes over title authorities [i.e. Presidential authorities] and funding sources, while authorization to conduct training for the militias is turned on and off at a whim. One day they will be told to train, the next day not to, and the day after only to train senior leaders. Some Green Berets believe that this hesitation comes from the White House getting wind that most of the militia members are affiliated with Nusra and other extremist groups.” 

Murphy writes: 

“While the games continue on, morale sinks for the Special Forces men in Turkey. Often disguised in Turkish military uniform, one of the Green Berets described his job as, ‘Sitting in the back room, drinking chai while watching the Turks train future terrorists’ … 

“Among the rebels that U.S. Special Forces and Turkish Special Forces were training, ‘A good 95 percent of them were either working in terrorist organizations or were sympathetic to them,’ a Green Beret associated with the program said, adding, ‘A good majority of them admitted that they had no issues with ISIS and that their issue was with the Kurds and the Syrian regime.’”