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Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh! No kings – at least not today. I’m with my si  ster and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about twenty miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye tomorrow), but what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally.
   One of multi-thousands of rallies across the country. Oh, yes!
   More than a thousand people are crowded in the park in the center of town. Most of them are holding signs. The collective vibration is enormous. Honk! Honk! Save the country! But as we walk among them, as the cheers and claps reverberate, I can’t stop feeling small and cynical – by myself, a spectator among the participants. Does creating change amount to nothing more than joining the cheers?

One of the more interesting aspects of the expanding war between Israel and Iran is the way the media and the crowd of “experts” have avoided any discussion of the possible, or perhaps even likely, upcoming decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dig deep into his secret nuclear weapons arsenal to enable the total destruction of Iran’s prime targets. Such targets are likely to include Iran’s own apparently civilian use nuclear develop program, which is protected deep underground in Natanz and elsewhere. Iran’s surviving military and civilian leaders are also now believed to be well protected underground after the recent debacle which saw the Israeli first strike kill a number of generals and other top officials. Netanyahu would like to finish the job by making a leaderless Iran unable to defend itself and maintain sovereignty as an independent nation.

For weeks, Congress has been wrapped up in passing President Trump’s big, brutal budget — the one that pays for tax cuts for the wealthy and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by taking food stamps and Medicaid away from people struggling to get by.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives just barely passed this bill — it squeaked through by a single vote. Now the Senate is considering it.

Alongside trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy, the bill also gives big handouts to the Pentagon and the president’s plans to separate immigrant families. It would result in the country’s first-ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget — and triple annual spending on the mass detention of immigrants.

General Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander, claimed that after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration had a plan to attack seven majority-Muslim countries over five years, starting with Iraq and followed by Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Iran was the only country not yet attacked, until this week. But it has been in the cross hairs of the American Empire for a long time. Clark said this was shown to him about 10 days after 9/11.

The American Empire has been consistent over the years in demonizing Iran, using the same playbook that was used to demonize Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi . There is a long list of propaganda tools that are effective. One obvious one is that every event in the Middle East is preceded by “Iranian backed”. Iranian backed Hezbollah, Iranian backed Yemeni, Iranian backed Hamas, Iranian backed Ice Cream.

Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”

This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.

Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.