in Tiananmen Square . As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto , The Audacity of Hope , in 2006 , Susan Rice , then an informal adviser , felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton , to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft . At the outset of the Syrian uprising , in early 2011 , Power argued that the rebels , drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens , deserved America ’s enthusiastic support .
As presidential election day draws near , Clinton will be hailed as the first female president , regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about " hope " . And the drool goes on . Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as " funny , charming , with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician " , Obama the other day sent drones to slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattle150 people in Somalia . He kills people usually on Tuesdays , according to the New York Times , when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone . So cool .
As the executive director of the largest American Muslim group , CAIR , said yesterday : “ For many years , members of the LGBT community have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim community against acts of hate crimes , Islamophobia , marginalization , and discrimination . Today , we stand with them , shoulder to shoulder . ” Muslims who work to make Islam more open to LGBTs deserve support , but those most eager to demonize Islam — for all sorts of tribalistic , nationalistic , and religious reasons — typically erase such people because their presence demonstrates how misleading the absolutist pictures of Muslims they want to paint are . Despite all this data , the standard group of hateful polemicists who literally seem to devote their lives to exploiting every news event to attack Islam wasted no time yesterday — before any facts were known , while the bodies were literally still in the club — squeezing the horrific slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattlein Orlando to depict Muslims as uniquely hateful of LGBTs . Never mind that the suspect , Omar Mateen , showed no signs of religious fanaticism , was ( according to numerous close sources ) suffering from mental illness , had a history of wife - beating , worked for a major defense / mercenary contractor , had no known connection to extremist groups until his 911 call citing ISIS , and was obsessed with joining the NYPD . The opportunity to exploit LGBT suffering to fuel the standard anti - Muslim agenda was far too attractive to resist , no matter how many facts negate it .
In fact , according to one study in International Studies Quarterly , Washington and Moscow intervened in a third country ’s elections 117 times between 1946 and 2000 . And yet it ’s Russia that is being portrayed as the singular bad guy here , Russia that is being turned into the existential threat to the civilised world . As The Economist put it , ‘ four years ago Mitt Romney , then a Republican candidate , said that Russia was America ’s “ number - one geopolitical foe ” ... With Russia hacking the American election , presiding over mass slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattlein Syria , annexing Crimea and talking casually about using nuclear weapons , Romney ’s view has become conventional wisdom . ’ Indeed . As the Guardian concluded , the big ‘ strategic , security and diplomatic problem ’ of our age is : ‘ what to do about Russia ? ’ Russia is being conjured up in the Western political imagination as the enemy , the threat that must be dealt with , the military power that must be shot down , as Tory MP Andrew Mitchell sees it .
Here is the fact on guns . Let ’s talk about guns . That horrible , horrible Sandy Hook — what ’s the word we want to use , murder , assault , slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattle, unspeakable act . Back in 1988 , I ran for the United States Congress one seat in the state of Vermont . I probably lost that election , which I lost by three points , because I was the only candidate running who said , you know what ?
Another report issued two years ago by Harvard University conservatively estimated that the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars amounted to $ 75,000 for every American household . The report points to previous studies indicating that the wars cost tens of thousands of jobs and significantly reduced investment in infrastructure . The vast amount of resources diverted into slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattleand destruction in the Middle East and Central Asia could have funded the $ 3.32 trillion that the American Society of Civil Engineers ( ASCE ) says must be spent over the next decade to fix America ’s crumbling ports , highways , bridges , trains , water and electric facilities and paid off the entire $ 1.26 trillion in student debt , with money left over . Instead , the elected officials of both major capitalist parties have continuously insisted that there is no money for jobs , decent wages , education , health care and other basic necessities , while spending unlimited money on militarism and war , leaving the bill to be paid for through the intensification of austerity measures directed against the working class . The human and fiscal toll wrought by the wars of the last 15 years are only a foretaste of the global catastrophe that is threatened as US imperialism prepares for far larger wars , with its military escalation focused ever more directly against the world ’s second and third largest nuclear powers , Russia and China .
Friday ’s pageant consisted of a swimsuit competition , two formal - wear competitions and a question - and - answer portion . Asked about “ pinkwashing , ” the accusation that Israel exploits its LGBT rights record as a PR coup to hide its alleged abuses of Palestinians , pageant organizer Yisraela Stephani Lev said , according to The Jerusalem Post : “ Listen , there is n’t propaganda here . We live in Tel Aviv , in Israel , the only sane country in the region where people can live as gays or transgender and no one is going to throw them off the rooftop or slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattlethem . This is just the reality here . It ’s not some sort of brainwashing or pinkwashing or whatever . ”
“ [ Because ] America stands up to countries that treat women like animals or people of different races , religions , or ethnicities as less human . ” Yes — when it ’s in America ’s interest . You think it does n’t tear me up to see starving kids or women led to the slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattle? You think I do n’t wonder what I could have done ? Sometimes the hard choice — yes , I read the damn book — is doing nothing at all .
AP : Associated Press 13 The Syrian Civil Defense group known as the White Helmets , run through the damaged buildings after airstrikes in the village of Hass AP : Associated Press 13 The area around the school was reduced to rubble International Development Secretary Priti Patel hit out last night : “ Schools should be safe places to learn , not transformed into places of slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattle. ” “ These airstrikes are a barbaric assault on the world ’s humanity . The daily atrocities can not continue . ”
America the vulnerable ISIS - inspired terrorists are now exploiting our country 's unique and astonishingly easy access to military - derived weapons , where a semiautomatic AR-15 can be purchased in under 10 minutes . In the past year , we 've seen two mass shootings — in San Bernardino and Orlando — by self - radicalized terrorists who secured weapons for their mass slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattlewith trivial effort . These terrorists are exploiting a vulnerability identified in jihadi training materials going back over a decade . A terrorist manual discovered in Afghanistan in the early 2000s titled " How can I train myself for Jihad " encourages would - be terrorists to obtain military - grade weapons in America : In " some states of USA , " it reads , " it is perfectly legal for members of the public to own certain types of firearms .
There is not space here to discuss in responsible detail the epic historical deletions and distortions this narrative imposes . The omissions are staggering . They range from the slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattleof hundreds of thousands of Filipinos resisting U.S. imperial invasion and occupation at the last century ’s outset to the restoration of de facto slavery in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after World War I ; the unnecessary atom bombing of Hiroshima and , even worse , of Nagasaki ( really the first shots of the Cold War ) ; the toppling of more than 50 governments by U.S. coups and invasions since the end of World War II ; the liquidation of perhaps as many as 5 million Southeast Asians in the so - called Vietnam War between 1962 and 1975 ; the Cold War - era sponsorship of Third World fascism from Chile to South Africa and Indonesia ; the attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and numerous CIA - directed terror bombings in socialist Cuba ; the near instigation of global thermonuclear war on at least three occasions ; the development and sponsorship of Osama bin Laden and other radically arch - reactionary , jihadist Muslim , paramilitary forces to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan ; the “ Highway of Death , ” when U.S. warplanes engaged in an aerial traffic jam as they rushed to slaughter tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Iraq in 1991 ; the coordination and sponsorship of a mass - murderous civil war on peasants , workers and intellectuals ( with a death toll well into the many hundreds of thousands ) in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s ; the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq ( responsible for at least 1 million Iraqi deaths ) ; the calamitous U.S. toppling of the Libyan Gadhafi regime ; the calamitous destabilization of the Syrian regime ; the U.S. funding and encouragement of civil war in central Africa ; the enablement and protection of a vicious right - wing coup in Honduras in the spring and summer of 2009 ; the criminal U.S. global war of terror , replete with rampant “ targeted assassinations , ” torture , illegal renditions , endless drone war and special - forces killing operations across the Muslim world and other places as well .
China ’s UN Ambassador Liu Jieyi “ Russia has become one of the chief purveyors of terror in Aleppo , using tactics more commonly associated with thugs than governments , ” US Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations David Pressman told the council . He said Russia was “ intent on allowing the killing to continue and , indeed , participating in carrying it out ” and that what was needed from Moscow was “ less talk and more action from them to stop the slaughterconflict.attack.selfdirectedbattle. ” A UN resolution needs nine votes in favour and no vetoes to be adopted . The veto powers are the United States , France , Britain , Russia and China .