After the annual mutual congratulation session known as the White House Correspondents' Dinner concluded Saturday, NBC News White House reporter Kelly O'Donnell distanced herself from the program. O'Donnell thought Daily Show comedienne Michelle Wolf had been too rough on Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

"The spirit of the event had always been jokes that singe but don't burn," O'Donnell wrote.

Like your reporting, you mean?

The White House Correspondents' dinner has always been a bad aristocratic joke, the punch line obvious to everyone but the participants. "Make a joke - but not a real one" has been its unofficial motto since forever. That is exactly what was said, for instance, in 1996, when shock jock Don Imus made his infamous appearance at the Radio and TV Correspondents' dinner. Somehow reporters were surprised when Imus said the same things in front of Bill and Hillary Clinton he'd been saying on the radio for years, making jokes about Whitewater and Bill's womanizing rep, among other things. The D.C. press was horrified.

"Now none of us can go on [Imus's] show again," complained Cokie Roberts.

"We wanted some discomfort, but not that much," said ABC's Jackie Judd, one of that event's organizers, perfectly predicting future sentiments about Wolf.

The Imus incident really should have been the last correspondents' ball of any kind, as it revealed the basic nature of the proceeding. It's designed to be a chummy mutual admiration society, in which pols and pundits dressed in black tie stroke each other to the edge of ecstasy over champagne and filet mignon.

A comic is often invited. The humorist's job is to make an anodyne joke or two about the first family before rapidly sitting down and shutting the %$^k up (a curtsey is optional).

After this "roast," the president is supposed to get up and take a free shot at one or two or six of the administration's most hated journos, before quickly retreating into a state of feigned respect for the weasel-audience.

It's a repulsive scene, and only ever becomes interesting when someone forgets to tell the comic to leave the gloves on, as with Wolf.

The consensus among media pros seems to be that Wolf went too far with a routine that began, "Like a porn star says when she's about to have sex with a Trump, let's get this over with."

The line most-often cited as being the most offensive was this one, aimed at Sanders: "I actually really like Sarah. I think she's very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye..."

Sarah Huckabee Sanders attends the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner at Washington Hilton on April 28, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Rather than be offended by that, the press took offense on Sanders' behalf. O'Donnell's NBC colleague Andrea Mitchell tweeted a typical reaction:

"Apology is owed to @PressSec and others grossly insulted ny [sic] Michelle Wolf at White House Correspondents Assoc dinner which started with uplifting heartfelt speech by @margarettalev - comedian was worst since Imus insulted Clinton's [sic]"

Apparently Mitchell is still scarred by that 1996 experience of having to watch a comedian make a mean joke to the face of a sitting president, and not be executed on the spot.

Of course, there was no chance of that this year, as the current president does not attend the correspondents' ball - not for any good reason, of course, but because he can't take a joke and also is preemptively bitter that he won't be slobbered over by the audience as was the custom with, say, Barack Obama.

That didn't mean Wolf let Trump off the hook. On the contrary, she ripped him from start to finish, to the early delight of the crowd.

"You can't shut me up as a woman ... unless you are Michael Cohen and wire me $130,000," she joked. "You can find me on Venmo under my porn star name, Reince Priebus."

But the crowd of reporters turned silent when Wolf started in on them, noting that we in the media could be covering a lot of things, but instead only cover "like three topics": "Every hour it's Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don't go home for Thanksgiving," she quipped.

The laughs here slowed to a kind of half-laughing, half-grumbling sound that Steve Martin would have called "just a general murmur."

"You guys are obsessed with Trump," Wolf went on, smiling. "Did you use to date him? You pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him."

Murmur, murmur, murmur!

"What no one in this room wants to admit is Trump helped all of you," she went on. "He couldn't sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV. You created this monster, and now you're profiting off of him."

She went on to remind the crowd that there's still no clean water in Flint, a not-so-subtle reference to the topics we could be covering instead of the all-Trump, all-the-time format that everyone from Les Moonves of CBS to CNN International chief Tony Maddox has admitted has been great for the bottom line of our business. Afterward, the head of the White House Correspondents' Association, Margaret Talev, effusively apologized for her own invitee's unconscionable decision to say true things in public.

"Last night's program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility," Talev wrote. "Unfortunately, the entertainer's monologue was not in the spirit of that mission."

Everything that is revolting about the D.C. press corps was on display in this incident. On the one hand, who cares - it's just a party, right? On the other hand, why are we partying with the people we're supposed to be covering?

The reason is that a significant portion of the national press corps genuinely gets off on the experience of being close to power. They love going to fancy restaurants and being whispered to by a Senatorial aide or, better yet, an actual Senator. Even more titillating is being handed a packet of secrets by someone at the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon!

This is why so many journalists circle the wagons when someone dares to interrupt their public love sessions with the people who misuse our tax money, bomb innocent civilians, lie to us, give get-out-of-jail free cards to white collar criminals, etc.

We're supposed to recoil from them, as from scorpions, but instead we host dinners for them, beg for photo ops, and defend them from even the most remotely pointed barbs. It's gross.

The 1999 Overseas Press Club awards, in which famous journos ripped then-Pacifica reporters Jeremy Scahill and Amy Goodman for disrupting the ceremony to ask a question about Kosovo of keynote speaker and Clinton Yugoslavia envoy Richard Holbrooke, was a classic example of the wagon-circling phenomenon. Wolf's take on the press relationship to Trump, of course, was dead-on. The press affects to hate Trump, and on an individual level some reporters may, but the degree to which he's been a financial boon to the entire media business has long been the dirty little secret of the Trump era. The bit about acting like we used to date him is totally true. There's a glee in how much we talk about him that's unseemly.

Moreover, while the vast majority of reporters in this country don't work in Washington or get off on prostrating themselves before the rich and powerful, the most visible among us do often act that way, which has considerable impact on public perception of the press.

We didn't just "create this monster" by giving Trump oodles of free coverage during the campaign season. We also did so by too often acting like courtiers to power instead of adversaries who challenge it, behavior that allowed the billionaire Trump to ludicrously - but successfully - portray the press as the real "elite" during the 2016 race, while he, Trump, was just a regular guy.

The White House Correspondents' Dinner has always been an odd concept. It's strange to me when reporters try to have friends at all, much less ones in the White House. What's the point? If the public thinks the news is Nerf-balled and stage-managed for our powerful would-be buddies - "some discomfort, but not that much" - they'll tune us out more than they already have.

To me this is like the all-too-common scenario when pundits and pols who rip each other on TV glad-hand each other and exchange digits in the green room afterward. The public may not see these scenes, but they pick up on the phoniness nonetheless, and end up hating press and politicians alike.

There haven't been too many positive developments of the Trump years, but the end of black tie lovefests and the charade of buddy-buddy press-pol relations might be one. Is being on the outside so bad?
(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

ON THE fifth day of the six-day war in 1967, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister, Levy Eshkol. The Israeli army had just conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and I proposed that Eshkol immediately offer the Palestinian people to establish the State of Palestine there, in return for peace with Israel.

I was a Member of the Knesset at the time. Two days after the end of the war, Eshkol asked me to meet him in his office in the Knesset building.

He listened to what I had to say, and then he answered with a fatherly smile: "Uri, what kind of a trader are you? In a negotiation, one offers the minimum and demands the maximum. Then one starts to negotiate, and in the end one reaches an agreement somewhere in the middle. And here you want to offer everything before the negotiation even starts?"

I objected feebly that this may be true about an ordinary deal, but not when the fate of nations is concerned.

(The Trade Minister, Haim Zadok, a very clever lawyer, soon gave me another lesson in the Zionist mentality. I asked him what part of the newly occupied territories the government was ready to give back. He replied: "Simple. If possible, we shall give back nothing. If they press us, we shall give back a small part. If they press us more, we shall give back a large part. If they press us very hard, we shall give back everything." At the time, giving back meant giving back to the King of Jordan.)

There was no effective pressure, so Israel kept everything.

I REMEMBERED this episode when I watched the second episode of Raviv Drucker's outstanding TV series about Israel's past Prime Ministers. After Ben-Gurion came Levy Eshkol.

Drucker portrays Eshkol as a nice and bumbling politician, a weak person who happened to be in office when the most fateful war broke out with results that have shaped our destiny to this very day. Little Israel became a regional power, with large occupied territories north, east and west. Eshkol was pushed around by his rebellious generals, made decisions against his will under duress. So Israel's present situation was shaped almost by accident.

All Drucker's facts are scrupulously correct, and like the chapter about Ben-Gurion, this one, too, is full of new disclosures, new even to me.

Yet I think that Drucker's characterization of Eshkol is not completely accurate. True, Eshkol was an amiable person, modest and moderate, but underneath it all there was a hard core, an obstinate belief in the Zionist ideology.

Before becoming Prime Minister by the general consent of the Labor Party, when Ben-Gurion had become intolerable and was kicked out, Eshkol was in charge of settlements. His determination to settle Jews on the land owned by Arabs was unshakable.

Between us a curious relationship developed. I was the enfant terrible of the Knesset, a one-man faction in extreme opposition, hated by the ruling Labor Party. I was seated in the Knesset hall just under the speaker's podium, an ideal place to interrupt the speaker.

Eshkol was an abominable speaker, the despair of the stenographers. His sentences had no beginning and no end. When I interrupted him with a remark, he forgot what he was going to say, turned towards me and answered in a friendly way, driving his party colleagues mad.

But I had no illusions. It was under his government that the Knesset enacted a law that was quite openly designed to close down my weekly magazine, which was detested by the ruling party (a fact that induced me to run for the Knesset).

WHEN THE 1967 Middle East crisis started, Eshkol - then both Prime Minister and Minister of Defense - indeed hesitated to act. Israel was threatened by three Arab armies, America's consent to an Israeli attack was not assured. The crisis lasted for three weeks, and the anxiety of the Israeli population intensified from day to day.

Eshkol looked like an unlikely war leader. At the height of the crisis, he decided to make a radio speech to lift the spirits of the nation. He read from a prepared text - prepared too much. An advisor had improved the manuscript, changing some words. When he reached these words, Eshkol stumbled. It sounded like indecision, and immediately a public conviction was formed: Eshkol must go, or at least give up the Defense Ministry.

A group of women (nicknamed "the Merry Wives of Windsor") demonstrated in the streets, Eshkol surrendered and Moshe Dayan became Minister of Defense.

The army, which for years had been superbly armed and prepared by Eshkol, won a crushing victory. Dayan, the picturesque one-eyed ex-general became the great victor, the dream of women around the world, though his contribution had been minimal.

When it all ended, Eshkol's stature in the public mind remained low. While the case can be made that he was the real victor, all the glory went to the glamorous generals. Israel became a militarist state, the generals became national heroes, Dayan, who was quite incompetent, was venerated.

AND THEN, less than two years after the war, Eshkol suddenly died. These were the fateful two years, in which the surprising results of the war had to be dealt with.

There was no real debate. My friends and I advocated the creation of a Palestinian state and found no support - neither in Israel nor throughout the world. When I visited Washington DC, everybody was adamantly against it. Even the Soviet Union (and the Israeli Communist party) took up the idea only years later.

One of the arguments against it was that the "Arabs of the West Bank" (God forbid calling them Palestinians) wanted to return to the King. So I went to see all the prominent local leaders in the West Bank. At the end of every conversation I asked them point blank: If you had the choice between returning to Jordanian rule or creating a Palestinian state, what would you choose?" Every one of them said: "a Palestinian state, of course."

When I brought this up in a Knesset debate, Dayan, then still the Minister of Defense, answered that I was lying. When I brought it up again in a debate with the Prime Minister, Eshkol supported his minister.

But then Eshkol did something that only an Eshkol could do: his advisor for Arab affairs called me and asked for a meeting. We met in the Knesset Member's cafeteria. "The Prime Minister has asked me to find out on what you base your assertion," he told me.

I recounted my conversations with the various Arab leaders in the occupied territories. He drew up a meticulous protocol and summed it up: "I agree with MK Avnery on every detail. However, we both agree that a Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as capital is unthinkable. Since the government has decided to keep East Jerusalem in any peace agreement, the idea of a Palestinian state is irrelevant." (I have just transferred this document to the National Archive.)

The extreme right already demanded the annexation of all the occupied territory to Greater Israel, but they were then far from power, and few took them seriously.

What remained was the vague "Jordanian Option". The idea was to return the West Bank to King Hussein, on the condition that he let us have East Jerusalem.

That was a crazy idea, resulting from a total ignorance of Arab reality. The king was a scion of the Hashemite family, the family of the prophet Muhammad. The idea that he would give up the third holiest place of Islam, the place from which the Prophet himself had ascended to heaven, was ludicrous. But Eshkol, like all the other ministers, had no idea about Islamic or Arab affairs.

THE ONLY Israeli Prime Minister who knew Arab Palestinians was hardly mentioned in Drucker's series: Moshe Sharett.

Sharett was Israel's second Prime Minister. When Ben-Gurion decided to abdicate and settle in the Negev, Foreign Minister Sharett was chosen by his party to succeed him. It took Ben-Gurion about a year to decide that he wanted to be Prime Minister after all, so he returned to the Defense Ministry, and after some time to the Prime Minister's office.

Sharett was the opposite of Ben-Gurion in almost every respect. It is no accident that Drucker hardly mentions him. He was considered weak, indeed negligible. While Ben-Gurion was decisive, bold and even adventurous, Sharett was considered a coward and widely despised.

But Sharett, who came to Palestine from Ukraine at the age of 12, had lived for two years in Arab neighborhoods. Unlike all other Prime Ministers, he spoke Arabic, thought Arabic and understood the Arabs. He even looked faintly Arab, with a well kept mustache.

When Ben-Gurion returned from his Negev self-exile, he had the idea of invading Lebanon, installing a Christian leader as dictator, and turning it into the first Arab state to make peace with Israel. Sharett, still Prime Minister, thought this a stupid idea. But he did not dare to stand up to Ben-Gurion publicly. He went home and wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion, in which he listed everything that was wrong about the idea. The plan was abandoned.

A generation later, Ben-Gurion's favorite, Ariel Sharon, then Minister of Defense, executed Ben-Gurion's plan, with exactly the results Sharett had prophesied. But it did not help to resurrect Sharett's reputation.

Sharett was also a very vain person. Once we met at the foot of the Metsada (Masada) mountain, at the start of the very arduous climb to the top. It took him an hour and 5 minutes, quite a feat for a man of his age. Yet, by mistake, I reported in my paper that it took him 105 minutes. He was so enraged that he sent me an official letter demanding a correction and an apology. I complied, of course.

The following article was authored by Glen Ford when he was editor of The Black Commentator.

Bill Cosby's Confused Notions Of 'Responsibility'

The Black Commentator, June 3, 2004

Bill Cosby has some nerve talking about "personal responsibility." On May 17, with no warning, the 67-year-old multimillionaire comedian ambushed three venerable Black organizations - the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Howard University - fatally disrupting a gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown desegregation decision. Cosby drew from the hip (or the lip) to spray the hall with generalized insults against people who weren't even there: the Black poor who, he said, "are not holding up their end in this deal."

Apparently, Cosby thinks he is one of the deal-makers, and that he's been cheated. The mostly Black, tuxedoed attendees at Washington's Constitution Hall, forced to bear witness to Cosby's tirade, were also to blame "in this deal" since they had collectively failed to sufficiently call the "lower economic people" to account for their "personal responsibility" deficits.

Not once did it occur to "Cos" that he owed his immediate and larger audience the benefit of a well-prepared presentation. Dr. Cosby saw no need to buttress his rant with a single reliable fact, nor to provide a coherent structure for his argument, so that reasonable people might arrive at some useful conclusions. Instead, he played the elderly "shock jock," frothing and flailing away, spewing a sewer of abuse that, if directed against other ethnic groups, would be considered blood libels. (See a compilation of "Cosbyisms" at the end of this essay.)

The super-successful entertainer, famed for his practiced timing and flawless delivery, the evangelist of education - the discipline in which he received his Ph.D. - displayed an utter disrespect for his audience and for the august occasion of the anniversary. His extended outburst, presented without the evident benefit of even the most rudimentary preparation, was a gross violation of professional and personal discipline - an affront Cosby would never commit against a half-drunk nightclub crowd, much less the corporate and university audiences he regularly addresses. Yet he gave free rein to his inner demons in front of a throng of African Americans at Constitution Hall on the anniversary of Brown.

The irresponsible icon

Icons always have apologists; Cosby has a media-full. Black people who should be insulted, instead make excuses for Cosby's shameful, impulsive, totally uninhibited behavior that, in a non-icon, would invite suspicions of substance abuse.

USA Today's Black columnist DeWayne Wickham - normally a smart fellow - sugarcoats Cosby's bile as "talking black" - as if Black discussions of public policy, including subjects as momentous as the Fate of the Race, are by definition devoid of substance, structure, precision or logic. A similar exculpatory current runs through most corporate newspaper columns penned by Black writers in the wake of the Cosby abomination.

Amazingly, the out-of-control, grotesquely self-indulgent comedian was roundly praised for his "courage" in confronting the supposed Black phobia against "airing dirty linen" in public, i.e., within hearing distance of whites. How perverse and ironic! Much of the Black talking classes forgive Cosby's clear lack of a sense of "personal responsibility" and elementary decorum, precisely because to do otherwise would risk diminishing a Black icon - in front of white people! Better to let Cosby's insults to African Americans, slide.

And since when was it an act of courage to badmouth poor Black people in America?

By simple standards of civility Cosby is guilty of an extreme lapse in "personal responsibility" by dint of his behavior to his audience and to the millions of people he slandered. More to the point, Cosby doesn't know the meaning of the term - and neither do most of the Black chatterers who have been bandying it about.

Role Model mogul

What do the various political actors mean by "personal responsibility?" Certainly, we know that in the mouths of Republicans and their Black camp followers "personal responsibility" is a code for what people are told to exercise when the state refuses to see to the general welfare of its non-rich citizens. We know that song. But what does Cosby mean, and why are otherwise progressive Black writers and politicians bending over backwards to find ways to agree with him?

An enormous vacuity surrounds the Black discussion over Cosby's remarks. People rush to say "yes" to a term, the definition of which is not necessarily shared or understood. Where does "personal responsibility" end and "social responsibility" begin? If a comedian turned demagogue can hector a substantial portion of a race of people to behave as he (vaguely) commands, then surely he is talking politics, not just giving advice to individuals. Cosby's politics are in fact rooted on the conservative side of the Black spectrum - that is, when he is being coherent at all.

The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page recalls:

"Cosby was saying the same thing backstage when I interviewed him during my college days. It was 1968, but he didn't want to talk about black power, Black Panthers or cultural revolutions. He wanted to complain about why so many young blacks of my generation were wasting the great opportunities that hard-won civil rights victories had brought us. In those politically polarized times, I was disappointed by his traditionalist attitude. But I appreciate its wisdom today with new eyes, the eyes of a parent."

Thirty-two years later, Cosby was still urging young people on campus to be politically passive. At Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in May, 2000, he warned students:

"Those of you going to grad school, listen to me carefully... I know you have an idea of how you want to make a change in the world. That is not what grad school is for. Do what they tell you to do and then when you graduate, do what you want to do. That is what grad school is for. If you're gonna argue with the professor you're going to not get a good grade, you're not going to graduate in grad school. Okay? So take your young idea, study what they want you to study, kick tail and then when you get your turn to write your dissertation then you tell it the way it ought to be told.

"It is not for you to stand up and argue... You get an A on all the tests and then, make your move."

Because of men and women who shared Cosby's worldview, many Black college campuses were relatively quiet during the Civil Rights Movement, a silence enforced by Black administrators who did not hesitate to expel students and fire faculty who sought any change whatsoever in the status quo, on or off campus. Later in the Sixties, Blacks on white college campuses tended to be significantly more activist than students at traditionally Black schools, largely because they were not smothered by a "tradition" hostile to mass Black political activity.

Cosby advocates a neutered Black politics of individual striving within the parameters that are allowed by those in power. He projects his own, self-invented persona as a "role model" for African Americans to follow as individuals, while rejecting collective action to alter power relationships. His message: Each of you people should do as I did. Cosby's method is derived from a long line of accommodationist Negro leaders whose message was the equivalent of, "Eat your Jell-O."

Ironically, the young Cosby did not follow traditionalist counsel. He dropped out of college to pursue the wildly perilous career of Black standup comedian in a largely segregated America. Had he failed as a comic - as the odds overwhelmingly dictated - without a good education he might not have been able to buy his mother a fine house far from the projects where he grew up. Luckily, Cosby the dropout didn't listen to people like - Cosby.

Spurned, vengeful benefactor

Cosby bucked the odds, but never the system. His job was to become a Role Model for a Black presence within the existing order. Once that was accomplished, he added a make-believe family to the Model: the Huxtables. Writer Khalil Tian Shahyd "wasn't surprised at all" at the tone of Cosby's Constitution Hall remarks:

After all, for more than a decade he presented us every Thursday with what he thought the ideal African-American family should look like. That we should listen to jazz, and have people like BB King come into our home for dinner and invite us to sit front row at his shows. Take weekend trips by limo to the most expensive hotel in the city for dinner and pampering just to treat our partners to a day without the children. Live in a big house with not one neighbor of color, where our children shave their heads to appear in a skin head rock video and are sheltered from the real world of zero sum politics, gentrification, under-funded and abandoned school districts, swelling prison populations, racial profiling, economic marginalization, domestic abuse and all those specifically "poverty based social ills."

Role Model Politics is nearly as emotion-laden as cult-of-personality politics - and just as divorced from reality. The Role Model is, by definition, the template of righteousness and progress. Those who fail to follow the Role Model's path are rejecting the Model's persona. No wonder Cosby goes ballistic at poor Black people's behavior - or what he imagines that behavior to be. He takes it personally. It's as if "those people" are all playing the "dozens" at his expense. How else to explain the explosive vitriol of Cosby's Constitution Hall performance?

However, Cosby's inability to perceive that he is obligated as a matter of "personal responsibility" to atone for his blanket verbal assaults, is his personal problem. It is far more worrisome that so many Black opinion molders harbor similar attitudes towards politics and the poor. Cosby showed his ass, but the same ill winds are blowing through the spaces in lots of Black skulls in high places. Deep down, they value other Black people little, and trust them less. They would rather celebrate virtual social mobility (the "Huxtables") than fight for the material resources that bring the possibility of dignity to millions. They see more virtue in a millionaire parting with a fraction of his money - although never enough to risk falling out of wealth - than in the selfless work of thousands of community organizers and activists who are motivated by a sense of both personal and social responsibility.

Dr. King and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton died in a social struggle to empower Black people. Cosby demonizes these same people, employing the enemy's language, like some vengeful, spurned benefactor. Yet much of Black media pretend not to see the throbbing ugliness in their icon, thus calling into question their own fitness. In the face of a brazen assault on the human dignity of African Americans, they equivocate - or join in the mass lynching. Mimicking racists, they impose yet another burden on the already super-disadvantaged Black poor. As Paul Street wrote in the April 8 issue of:

"The harsh material and structural-racist reality of American society interacts with timeworn, victim-blaming ruling-class explanations of poverty to play an ugly game on the nation's most truly disadvantaged. They are expected to magically leap beyond their social-historical circumstances - to exercise an inordinately high degree of sound personal responsibility just to keep their heads above water - while others are structurally empowered to "pass Go and collect $2 million" without such exercise, and indeed to deepen the well of black disadvantage."

By the end of this column, it will be clear which country the United States will invade and topple next. Or failing that, it will be clear which country our military-intelligence-industrial complex will be aching to invade next.

We all want to know why America does what it does. And I don't mean why Americans do what we do. I think that question still will be pondered eons from now by a future professor showing his students a video mind-meld of present-day UFC fighters booting each other in the head while thrilled onlookers cheer (not for either of the fighters but rather for more booting in the head).

But we all seem to assume that America-the entity, the corporation-has some sort of larger reasoning behind the actions it takes, the actions put forward by the ruling elite. And almost all of us know that the reasons we're given by the press secretaries and caricature-shaped heads on the nightly news are the ripest, most fetid grade of bullshit.

We now know that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. We now know that the crushing of Libya had nothing to do with "stopping a bad man." If one does even a cursory check of what dictators around the world are up to recently, you'll find that the U.S. doesn't care in the slightest whether they are bad or good, whether they're using their free time to kill thousands of innocent people or to harmonize their rock garden. In fact, the U.S. gives military aid to 70 percent of the world's dictators. (One would hope that's only around the holidays though.)

So if it's not for the stated reasons, why does the U.S. overrun, topple and sometimes occupy the countries it does? Obviously, there are oil resources or rare minerals to be had. But there's something else that links almost all of our recent wars.

As The Guardian reported near the beginning of the Iraq War, "In October 2000, Iraq insisted on dumping the U.S. dollar-the currency of the enemy-for the more multilateral euro."

However, one example does not make a trend. If it did, I would be a world-renowned beer pong champion rather than touting a 1-27 record. (I certainly can't go pro with those numbers.)

But there's more. Soon after Libya began moving toward an African gold-based currency-and lining up all its African neighbors to join it-we invaded it as well, with the help of NATO. Author Ellen Brown pointed this out at the time of the invasion:

> [Moammar Gadhafi] initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar.

This week, The Intercept reported that the ousting of Gadhafi, which was in many ways led by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, actually had to do with Sarkozy secretly receiving millions from Gadhafi, and it seemed that his corruption was about to be revealed. But, the article also noted, "[Sarkozy's] real military zeal and desire for regime change came only after [Hillary] Clinton and the Arab League broadcasted their desire to see [Gadhafi] go." And the fact that Gadhafi was planning to upend the petrodollar in Africa certainly provides the motivation necessary. (It doesn't take much to get the U.S. excited about a new bombing campaign. I'm pretty sure we invaded Madagascar once in the 1970s because they smoked our good weed.)

Right now you may be thinking, "But, Lee, your theory is ridiculous. If these invasions were about the banking, then the rebels in Libya-getting help from NATO and the United States-would have set up a new banking system after bringing down Gadhafi."

Actually, they didn't wait that long. In the middle of the brutal war, the Libyan rebels formed their own central bank.

Brown said, "Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank-this before they even had a government."

Wow, that sure does sound like it's all about the banking.

Many of you know about Gen. Wesley Clark's famous quote about seven countries in five years. Clark is a four-star general, the former head of NATO Supreme Allied Command, and he ran for president in 2008 (clearly he's an underachiever). But it's quite possible that 100 years from now, the one thing he'll be remembered for is the fact that he told us that the Pentagon said to him in 2002: "We're going to take down seven countries in five years. We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan. We're going to come back and get Iran in five years."

Most of this has happened. We have, of course, added some countries to the list, such as Yemen. We're helping to destroy Yemen largely to make Saudi Arabia happy. Apparently our government/media care only about Syrian children (in order to justify regime change). We couldn't care less about Yemeni children, Iraqi children, Afghan children, Palestinian children, North Korean children, Somali children, Flint (Michigan) children, Baltimore children, Native American children, Puerto Rican children, Na'vi children ... oh wait, I think that's from "Avatar." Was that fiction? My memories and 3-D movies are starting to blur together.

Brown goes even further in her analysis of Clark's bombshell:

What do these seven countries have in common? ... [N]one of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers' central bank in Switzerland. The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked.

So right now you're thinking, "But, Lee, then why is the U.S. so eager to turn Syria into a failed state if Syria never dropped the dollar? Your whole stupid theory falls apart right there."

First, I don't appreciate your tone. Second, in February 2006, Syria dropped the dollar as its primary hard currency.

I think I'm noticing a trend. In fact, on Jan. 4, it was reported that Pakistan was ditching the dollar in its trade with China, and that same day, the U.S. placed it on the watch list for religious freedom violations. The same day? Are we really supposed to believe that it just so happened that Pakistan stopped using the dollar with China on the same day it started punching Christians in the nose for no good reason? No, clearly Pakistan had violated our religion of cold hard cash.

This leaves only one question: Who will be next on the list of U.S. illegal invasions cloaked in bullshit justifications? Well, last week, Iran finally did it: It switched from the dollar to the euro. And sure enough, this week, the U.S. military-industrial complex, the corporate media and Israel all got together to claim that Iran is lying about its nuclear weapons development. What are the odds that this news would break within days of Iran dropping the dollar? What. Are. The. Odds?

The one nice thing about our corporate state's manufacturing of consent is how predictable it is. We will now see the mainstream media running an increasing number of reports pushing the idea that Iran is a sponsor of terrorism and is trying to develop nuclear weapons (which are WMDs, but for some strange reason, our media are shying away from saying, "They have WMDs"). Here's a 2017 PBS article claiming that Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism. One must assume this list of terror sponsors does not include the country that made the arms that significantly enhanced Islamic State's military capabilities. (It's the U.S.)

Or the country that drops hundreds of bombs per day on the Middle East. (It's the U.S.) But those bombs don't cause any terror. Those are the happy bombs, clearly. Apparently, we just drop 1995 Richard Simmons down on unsuspecting people.

Point is, as we watch our pathetic corporate media continue their manufacturing of consent for war with Iran, don't fall for it. These wars are all about the banking. And millions of innocent people are killed in them. Millions more have their lives destroyed.

I guess the Trump administration thinks Kim Jong Un is as dumb as Trump because they are "negotiating" with him to give up his nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions at the same time that they are swaggering around insisting they are going to tear up the Iran deal that was based on exactly those terms. And they must think he's unaware of US past behavior when we deposed Iraq's leader after he had given up his weapons and attacked Libya's leader after he gave up his. There were different reasons for both of those attacks but the pattern must look pretty obvious to Kim.

Still he's never dealt with a man with hands the size of Trump's so all bets are off.

I guess.

Here's Axios on Trump's masterful negotiating "style." It's lucky he was born with money or he would have been nothing more than a cheap street hustler selling stolen watches on a street corner:

President Trump tells people he keeps the world guessing with his wild unpredictability. But those who work most closely with him say he's a one-trick pony in negotiations.

The trick: Threaten the outrageous, ratchet up the tension, amplify it with tweets and taunts, and then compromise on fairly conventional middle ground.

"His ultimate gamble is: 'You don't have as big of stones as I do,'" a source close to Trump told me. "'You're going to feel too uncomfortable where I go. The stakes are too high. This is too far outside your comfort zone.'"

Consider these threats: To withdraw from Syria (he reengaged with missile strikes), withdraw from Afghanistan (he settled on the more-of-the-same strategy recommended by his generals), withdraw from the U.S.-Korean trade deal (Trump's team negotiated with the Koreans and announced modest changes to the deal), veto the government spending bill (he signed it), and impose severe worldwide tariffs on steel and aluminum (he offered a bunch of exemptions).

Sources who've been in the room with Trump for negotiations over NATO and various trade deals tell me they've at times felt "awkward" watching Trump go in hard against foreign leaders.

They say Trump seems immune to awkwardness - but then rarely follows through on his most extreme rhetoric.

The next few weeks promise three more Trump tricks:

After sending financial markets into a mass freakout over a trade war with China - which culminated in Trump's threatening China with $100 billion in tariffs - some senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are cautiously optimistic they'll find a compromise with Beijing. On Tuesday night, Mnuchin leads a delegation to China to try to negotiate a way out of the trade war.

Senior White House officials tell me a NAFTA deal could be "imminent" - meaning, an announcement could come in the next few days. Trump's team is still negotiating and views Canada as a major problem, but we're a far cry from a year ago when Trump's aides were telling us he was hellbent on terminating NAFTA.

Last August, the world braced for nuclear apocalypse as Trump threatened "fire and fury" against North Korea. And less than four months ago, Trump tweeted that his nuclear button is "much bigger & more powerful" than Kim Jong-un's. Now, we're anticipating peace talks on the Korean Peninsula.

Transportation accounts for about a quarter of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, making it the second-highest source, slightly behind the oil and gas industry. In the U.S., it's the largest source of emissions and pollution. Despite continued improvements in personal vehicle fuel standards since 1975, Canada's transportation emissions grew by 42 per cent from 1990 to 2015, partly because of growing populations and increasing numbers of vehicles on the road, and because of huge increases in sales of trucks, SUVs and "crossover" vehicles for personal use. Clearly, we must do better.

Instead, after years of progress, the U.S. administration is planning to roll back world class passenger vehicle fuel efficiency and emissions regulations set by the previous administration, bucking a worldwide trend toward cleaner vehicles. Since Canada and several other nations have historically followed the U.S. on fuel standards, this announcement could have negative ripple effects around the world.

It's difficult to fathom why a government would be so opposed to clean air, technological innovation, economic progress and healthier citizens that it would undo effective regulations that few people, even in industry, oppose. The only industries that might benefit are oil and automakers, and there's no indication they've been hurt by progress made over the past half century of increasingly higher standards. Top executives at Ford and GM have stated they support the standards, as have Toyota, Jaguar and Volvo.

The good news is that California and about a dozen U.S. states will continue to use their influence to maintain and strengthen much-needed rules, although there are hints the Environmental Protection Agency might undo a 50-year-old waiver that allowed California to set its own standards.

Whatever the U.S. does, it's time for Canada to steer its own course. If we want to meet our Paris Agreement climate commitments and protect citizens from pollution and climate disruption, we need policies and regulations to make all vehicles - including trucks and SUVs - less polluting.

Of course, the top priority should be to get people out of cars and trucks as much as possible, through investments in public transit and infrastructure for active transportation like cycling and walking. That would also help reduce congestion as growing populations add to the pressure on our roads. But we also must ensure that the cars, trucks and buses that will be with us for years to come are as non-polluting as possible.

One of the more promising developments is the rapid innovation and deployment of electric and hybrid vehicles. Electric vehicles are on track to reach more than half the world's new car sales by 2040, but the trend must accelerate if we are to succeed in addressing the climate crisis.

Just as the U.S. has followed California's example, Canada should follow Quebec's. In January, the province adopted a zero-emission vehicles standard, similar to California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. Under the plan, subject automakers must accumulate credits for putting zero- and low-emission vehicles into the market. The Quebec government says 41 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions are from the transport sector. Its goal is to increase zero- and low-emission vehicle sales and leases to 10 per cent of its market by 2025.

Canada signed on to a global goal of increasing electric vehicles sales to 30 per cent by 2030 and has committed to developing a zero-emission strategy, but has set no targets nationally. Progress has been slow, hindered in part by opposition from car manufacturers. Canada doesn't currently make mass-market electric vehicles.

As large economies including China, California and the European Union now require car dealerships to sell a greater proportion of zero- and near-zero-emission cars and trucks, Canada's counterparts may want to reconsider and join the leading edge of this revolution. Clinging to the status quo puts car manufacturing in Canada at risk.

Adopting a national zero-emission standard and investing in clean car manufacturing could save Canada's car industry and help counter the climate crisis.

I don't want to alarm people unnecessarily, but the planet is getting seriously pissed again.

From Reuters:

Steamboat Geyser, which can shoot water as high as 300 feet (91 meters) into the air, erupted on March 15, April 19 and on Friday. The last time it erupted three times in a year was in 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory said. The last time it erupted prior to March was more than three years ago in September 2014.

"There is nothing to indicate that any sort of volcanic eruption is imminent," Michael Poland, the scientist in charge for the observatory, said in an email.

"This year's eruptions have been smaller than a usual Steamboat eruption, but the two in April were about 10 times larger than an eruption at the park's famed Old Faithful Geyser in terms of the amount of water discharged,"" he said. Geologists have not pinpointed a reason for the latest series of eruptions, but say they could indicate a thermal disturbance in the geyser basin, or that Steamboat may be having smaller eruptions instead of one large.

Meanwhile, in central Asia, as the UN tells us, the greatest hoax in the history of the world is working just the way all those grant-fattened climatologists said it would.

According to the World Bank, for instance, temperatures in the Central Asia region could rise by up to 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That could cause more than a third of Central Asian glaciers to melt by 2050, exposing nearby villages to glacial floods.

In spite of these alarming prospects, most experts warn that people, buildings and governments are insufficiently prepared. I have been to so many missions and events where that observation was made.

From Turkmenistan to Tajikistan, risk assessments often underestimate the probability and cost of impacts such as utility outages, displaced households and accumulation of debris. Uncoordinated data makes it difficult to understand which areas are critically exposed. And emergency units within governments are often limited by narrow mandates and capabilities.

My go-phone just died. "Maybe you forgot to charge it?" asked a friend. No. I just forgot to pay my freaking phone bill at the first of the month.

If you don't pay your bills, you get cut off. Everyone knows that. It's the law. Literally. And this law not only just applies to ordinary people like you and me, it also applies to our government as well. Duh.

And the first of the month is once again starting to roll around for you and for me -- and also for the United States of America too.

Who is going to foot the bill for all those thousands of ICE raids that we hear so much about on TV?

Who is going to write out that big check for America's half-baked and squalid "war on terror" and all those other phony, invented (and totally pricey) other "wars" that Washington delights in?

Who will keep the lights on in our expensive and elaborate prison system?

Who is going to have to tighten their belts in order to pay for the Border Wall?

Who will have to bite the bullet financially in order to pay for the Afghanistan fiasco? Israel's sick apartheid regime? All those cute (and very expensive) little acronyms for oppressive operations abroad such as the CIA, AFRICOM, NATO, FUK-US, SOUTHCOM, PACOM, US-AID and SOCOM? And also for all those cute (and very expensive) little acronyms for oppressive operations here at home such as the NSA, SWAT, DEA, DHS, SEC, ATF and FDA?

Who will be stuck with trying to pay all these bills when the first of the month finally rolls around for the USA as well as for us? It will be you and me that will be stuck with trying to fend off the repo man after America goes bankrupt.

America is not spending its money wisely. And who the hell do you think is going to get stiffed for the tab?

 During World War II, Americans all voluntarily tightened their belts in order to pay for what they thought was a good use of their money -- but in America today most of us are involuntarily tightening our belts. But why? So that the the rich can get richer of course. Yet all we get out of it is to lose our homes, lose our futures and get even more stinking "wars" shoved down our throats.

PS: A border Wall and an ICE machine have only proved to be wasteful and stop-gap solutions to a very real problem. It's time to do the math correctly for a change. Immigrants come up here from Latin America because their lives down there have been made a living hell. So. If you don't want them to come here, stop screwing up their lives down there. Boom. End of problem. They'd probably rather stay down there anyway, given a choice.

PPS: While recently re-reading my (most excellent) book recounting my experiences as an embedded journalist during the "war" on Iraq, I was (sort of) surprised to see Mike Pence's name jump out on the page. Back in 2007, he and John McCain held a press conference in the Green Zone that I had attended, wherein Pence happily offered us poor benighted reporters an inside glimpse on how to be a truly shady war hawk.

Who knew back in 2007 that this war-drum-pounding little piece of shite would someday become America's vice-president and even help us spend approximately ten billion dollars in just one night on the illegal and criminal bombing of Syria. Guess Pence just couldn't get enough of Shock and Awe -- and was willing to tell the exact same lies to see it all happen again.

It may almost seem too obvious to mention, but I don't think that's why we so seldom mention it. I don't mean being male, or being mentally disturbed, or having been cruel to women, or living in places like the United States where it's easy to acquire weapons of war. These and many other factors are very significant and very often discussed, as they should be, when we consider mass killings.

There's something else that ties a lot of mass killers together, and it's also obvious, but seldom discussed. The man who killed with a van in Toronto had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation. The same day he killed in Toronto, the G7 countries were meeting at the University of Toronto and declaring their unified hostility toward Russia. The mass killing on Toronto's streets sought to solve problems in the same way that the Canadian government and its allies seek to solve problems.

The recent mass-killing in a Florida High School was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.

Why should anyone notice such points or generalize from them? Don't members of militaries and veterans have it hard enough already without such gross bigotry?

There's actually no need to generalize. Looking at a long list of mass shootings in the United States, almost all of the shooters are men, and almost all of them are between ages 18 and 59. Above age 59, the percentage of men in the general U.S. population who are veterans leaps up dramatically. Between 18 and 59 - by averaging the percentages for each age year - about 14.76 percent of U.S. men are veterans, but at least 35% of these shooters were veterans. I determined that by quickly reading available news reports online about each shooting, so the percentage is likely to be significantly higher. I found no news reports that stated that any of the shooters had not been in the military.

In U.S. mass shootings, military veterans are over twice as likely to be mass shooters, and probably much more likely than that. Needless to say, this is a statistic about a large population, not information about any particular individual. Needless to say, profiling and discrimination are counterproductive. But here's what else might be counterproductive: Training people in the arts of mass murder, launching wars, and dropping people trained for wars and having suffered through wars into a heavily armed society taught by schools and entertainment systems that mass-killing is the way to solve problems. Mass killing in the United States gets you on the news, and if you happen to be a president bombing a distant land it gets you widely praised and labeled as "finally presidential."

Of course it's possible that people inclined toward mass shootings are also inclined to join the military, that the relationship is a correlation and not a cause. In fact, I would be shocked if there wasn't some truth to that. But it's also possible that being trained and conditioned and given a familiarity with mass shootings - and in some cases no doubt an experience of engaging in mass shooting and having it deemed acceptable - makes one more likely to mass shoot. I cannot imagine there isn't truth in that.

The most killing Western societies do is done abroad by their militaries. In the United States, hundreds of deadly shootings every year are committed by police officers - disproportionately military veterans. Suicides, as well, are disproportionately committed by veterans. And not because we are untactful in pointing to problems, but because we generally fail to admit to and deal with problems. Veteran suicides are driven by guilt over having participated in killing. That guilt is the top factor in predicting suicide, according to the U.S. Veterans Administration.

Militarism will continue to cause extensive damage until we shift our culture to nonviolence. That shift needs to include our governments, and it needs to treat the illness, not just its symptoms. The answer to gun violence is not more guns any more than the answer to van violence is more vans. I hope that seems obvious. It should.

##

Dear Herr Little,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your policy to get rid of all the Jews, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 06-02-2018. We salute you Herr Little, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence