Blowing Out 500,000 Candles to Celebrate the 100th Birthday of Henry "the Mad Bomber" Kissinger

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Bill Kilgore reporting from Ho Chi Minh City

War criminal, serial liar, and Nixon confederate Henry Kissinger turned 100 this week (even as vastly better people like Tina Turner died much younger).  The press, which has given this dissembling poseur a free ride since 1968, was all in on the celebration.

First, for those of you younger than, um, 50, let's start with a little background on this great son of the Harvard (now Some Finagler) Faculty of Arts and Sciences, courtesy of The Nation:

We'll get a little deeper into the napalm-charred weeds but Anthony Bourdain's assessment remains painfully accurate:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”

What was Anthony so mad about? Just this:

Henry Kissinger says Good Morning Cambodia

Kissinger, who’d been appointed national security adviser, advised Nixon to order the bombing of Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to the negotiating table. Nixon and Kissinger were desperate to resume the talks that they had helped sabotage, and their desperation manifested itself in ferocity. “‘Savage’ was a word that was used again and again” in discussing what needed to be done in Southeast Asia, recalled one of Kissinger’s aides. Bombing Cambodia (a country the US wasn’t at war with), which would eventually break the country and lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, was illegal. So it had to be done in secret. The pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration, leading Kissinger and Nixon to ask J. Edgar Hoover to tap the phones of administration officials. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak sent Kissinger into a panic. He was afraid that since Ellsberg had access to the papers, he might also know what Kissinger was doing in Cambodia.

To impress North Vietnam, Kissinger ordered the secret bombing of a country the United States was not at war with.  That bombing took the lives of between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodians (with the lack of precision testimony to the scale and brutality of the assault).  God knows how many more were crippled or wounded.

Fun fact: North Vietnam was not impressed.

Kissinger's war crimes had been preceded by actual crimes, including treason on behalf of his patron Dick Nixon before the 1968 election:

Still a Harvard professor, .. Kissinger, “on his own,” offered to pass along information he had received from an aide attending the peace talks. . . .At the end of October, Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, “They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” Hours later, President Johnson suspended the bombing. A peace deal might have pushed Hubert Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. Nixon’s people acted quickly; they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks.

Through wiretaps and intercepts, President Johnson learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese “to hold on until after the election.” If the White House had gone public with this information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. “This is treason,” he said....

But we're not mainly interested in Kissinger's litany of war crimes and blunders, including green-lighting barbaric crimes against civilians by the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships, his insane advocacy of nuclear war in Europe while still locked in a cubicle in Littauer, his pointless prolongation of the Vietnam War for three sanguinary years, or his endless toadying to the increasingly paranoid and unhinged Dick Nixon, including an Oval Office prayer session.

We're interested in Kissinger's decades of success in generating gushing press coverage like this:

Kissinger has always enjoyed a favorable press

As if recoiling from their own sudden doggedness in exposing Nixon’s crimes, reporters and news anchors rallied around Kissinger. While the rest of the White House was revealed as a bunch of two-bit thugs, Kissinger remained someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’ Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” He was, Koppel added, “the best thing we’ve got going for us.”

Koppel's idiotic fawning drivel was the rule.  Marvin Kalb, once a well-regarded journalist for CBS News, sold his soul to get Henry's cooperation on a book that would make him a pantload of royalties:

Marvin Kalb was granted the ultimate honor of an exclusive television interview. They give credit where it is due, beginning their page of acknowledgments with this offer of appreciation: “Our thanks go first to Henry A. Kissinger, who, as an historian as well as a statesman, understands the critical importance of primary sourcing. He has been generous with his time and his knowledge.” It can fairly be said that his generosity has been rewarded.

How times have changed!  Now that Nixon's criminality and the insane brutal futility of the Vietnam War (and its Cambodian and Laotian spinoffs) have passed into incontrovertible history, Kissinger...still gets a fawning reception from the press on the no doubt auspicious occasion of his 100th birthday.

The Washington Post had the nerve to publish an op-ed by an objective source – Henry's non-war-criminal son David, explaining Henry's secret to a long and healthy life.  The correct answer of course was a sociopathic lack of shame or guilt, but instead David told us

His mind is a heat-seeking weapon that identifies and grapples with the existential challenges of the day. In the 1950s, the issue was the rise of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity. 

His actual position was that we should use nuclear weapons in Europe to prove how big and strong we are, an idiotic view that he adopted to suck up to Nelson Rockefeller and other Cold Warriors who might be able to advance Henry's career.  (And his mind, supposedly attracted by heat, somehow never spent even one minute regretting the bombs that burnt Cambodia towns and children.)

To balance out that piece, the Post published another P.O.S. patronizing those who did not join the birthday celebrations.

But the younger generation — or at least, the left-leaning among them — is indeed letting its own thoughts (and, yes, emotions) be known on the internet. There, making light of Kissinger’s eventual death — and remarkable longevity — has been a popular meme for years. 

Really? How popular is it? We waste a lot of time on the Internet, and we've never seen it, although we have spotted many mentions of the people who have been outlived by Liza Minelli, who is not a war criminal.

The piece did make glancing reference to Kissinger's atrocities in Cambodia but dropped the issue upon quoting this breathtakingly arrogant non-response from the Great Prevaricator:

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old. And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

We have thought about it, because hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Chileans, and Argentinians aren't alive to think about it for themselves.

We think that in the year 2023 the media's continuing to ignore Kissinger's criminality while treating him as a statesman is almost as dangerous as their continuing to ignore the Republican Party's participation in subversion and insurrection while treating it as a legitimate part of American politics.

In other words, it's an insult to everyone we remember on this Memorial Day and every thing they fought for.

Good and Dead: Ruthless despoiler of great newspapers dead at 81

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss

Even in an era where ruthless rapacious financial finaglers run rampant over the shattered ruins of once-great American businesses, he stood out for his ability to commit mayhem on a massive scale.

Sam Zell, 81, closed his final deal last week, as he descended from the ranks of the rich and feared into death and obscurity.  Not a great trade, Sam.

Zell, a Jewish lad from Poland, fled the Holocaust in 1939, leaving Anne Frank behind to her fate.  This was not a great trade either.

The Chicago Tribune, before Sam Zell...

Having learned how harsh and cruel the world could be, he spent his entire career returning the favor, amassing at first a large fortune in the cutthroat (and cutpurse) world of real estate investing, enjoying the insane tax breaks that a nobbled Congress lavishes on real estate speculators, and no one else. 

Having trousered $5 billion for selling his real estate empire to an even bigger bunch of financial finaglers, he looked for new worlds to ravish and came upon what was then at the time America's premier and highly profitable media company, Tribune.

In 2007, the Tribune Company was a media colossus.  Its holdings included great and profitable newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Long Island Newsday.   It also owned enormously successful and profitable television stations in Chicago (the nation's third largest TV market), Philadelphia (fourth), and New York (numero uno).  The cherry on top was the Chicago Cubs, the city's beloved baseball franchise which was eventually sold for $800 million.

By the time Sam Zell's financial genius had finished its work, the Tribune Company was a smoking ruin, thousands of jobs had been cut, and great newspapers had been hollowed out into worthless husks, still being plundered for pennies by another generation of rapacious asset-stripping finaglers who picked up the remains from the wreckage of Sam's empire.

He lost the Tribune empire the old-fashioned way: greed and hubris, aided and abetted by Wall Street vultures ready to pocket huge fees (and other revenue streams) by packaging risky securities and palming them off on schmucks, or, as they are known in investment banking, customers.

The deal, like a lot of buildings put up by unscrupulous real estate investors, was unsteady and jerry-built from the start.  At least when you're building physical structures, you have to comply with building codes.  When you're building financial structure, you can engineer anything you want, limited only by your greed and the credulity of investors.  In other words, no limits at all.

So in the pre-2008 heyday of insane debt structures, Zell loaded up Tribune with $13,500,000,000 in debt to buy out shareholders.  He put in his share too: $315 million, or 2.3% of the purchase price. 

Now things get shady.  To get out of paying taxes, he turned Tribune into something called an ESOP, a tax-advantaged structure based on employee ownership.  And indeed the employees pension plan did own the equity.

The only problem: the equity was worthless on day one, and declined in value thereafter.  Sam made his contribution as debt, so he would be made whole before the employees made a penny on their shiny new company.  Or, as The New York Times put it,

But employees, who had no say in the deal, assumed a crushing burden and stood to gain only if the company survived, while Mr. Zell, for a relatively modest investment, became chairman and secured an option to buy 40 percent of the company for $500 million if it prospered....Employees filed a barrage of lawsuits, but they had little effect, and the transaction was widely denounced by media commentators as lopsided — a potentially lucrative coup for Mr. Zell at the expense of thousands of employees, whose jobs, careers, pensions and futures had been mortgaged under a mountain of debt.

Funny how that works. Having engineered this tottering financial structure, Zell, like the Master of the Universe he thought he was, hired an absolutely unqualified schmuck to run it into the ground:

Mr. Zell installed managers who, like him, had no newspaper experience. His chief executive, Randy Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, resigned in the face of allegations that he had sexually harassed staff members and alienated many more with outlandish cronyism .... 

The entire shabby mess collapsed into bankruptcy a year later, and rotted there while Zell, lawyers, and other vultures feasted on the carcass.  The employees' pensions were wiped out, followed by their jobs. As a result, the newsrooms were hollowed out:

The Chicago Tribune lost its foreign and national staffs, slashed deeply into its Washington presence, and began whittling away at its costly veterans back home.

The punch line? After the bankruptcy, the Tribune ended up in the hands of even worse asset strippers who have completed the hatchet job Zell began, to the point where the newspaper has no office in the city of Chicago. The Los Angeles Times, like The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, ended up in the hands of a rich weirdo, who seems to have staunched the bleeding.

So much for Sam Zell the business legend.  You'll no doubt be surprised that he was an even worse person:

...and after he was done with it

A contrarian in business and private life, Mr. Zell eschewed conventions and was notoriously blunt, often barking at employees and using vulgarities in speeches and meetings. When the former Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher and others met him to voice concern over the health of The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Zell said he did not care what they thought, using an expletive for emphasis.

Zell, like other grubba naars, sought to compensate for his rapacious conduct, revolting personality and lack of height by sprinkling a few shekels of his ill-gotten gains on various charities willing to fawn over benefactors like him:

Mr. Zell, who had homes in Chicago, Sun Valley, Idaho and Malibu, Calif., was an active philanthropist, giving millions to the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a major donor to causes in Israel and to the American Jewish Committee, a Jewish primary school in Chicago named for his father, and other cultural and educational institutions.

That makes it OK, then. 

What makes his story remarkable is its lack of remarkability: almost every tycoon could be described as a miserable dick willing to sacrifice their employees and their enterprises at the altars of their greed and ego.  It's almost like we've built and encouraged a society that values rapacity over anything else.  

Of course, not all of them grow up to be President.

We like to think of Zell in his new abode, pitching to Mephistopheles his plan for a can't-miss leveraged buyout of Hell.   We wouldn't bet against him.  And we wouldn't bet on reading all about it in the shells of the great newspapers he plundered.

Chaos at the Border - Journalists Trapped for Days!

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman

EL PASO, Texas – The termination of the transparently fraudulent “public health” ban to seeking asylum has as predicted resulted in chaos, catastrophe, and disaster on the U.S. Southern Border.

Hordes of journalists, politicians and cable news talking heads have descended on the border, overwhelming both desperate refugees and the resources of hard-pressed area residents.

Flood of refugees not spotted at border

“We can't even walk down the street without being accosted by a camera crew,” complained El Paso resident Jaime Burke. “They've taken over our city and we need help desperately,” he said.

As the expected flood of refugees seeking admission failed to materialize, the plight of TV reporters desperately seeking alarming video to stream around the world only worsened.  “I've been standing out in the hot sun for nine hours and I still don't have any usable footage of thousands of scary immigrants rampaging across the border,” complained three-time local Dayton Emmy winner Janet Cooke.

But she said that her plight was growing ever more desperate.  “This sun is ruining my foundation, I'm sweating like a pig and my photographer spilled his latte over the my blazer.  How am I supposed to survive this ordeal?”

Jacksonville weekend anchor Judy Miller described her suffering: “First I missed my connection in Dallas and then the airline lost my luggage so I had to get a new outfit at Target.  Target!”  She shuddered at the unbearable memory.

“And now that I'm here, I have to go from border crossing to border crossing looking for someone to interview.  If this keeps us I'll be forced to interview Ted Cruz!”  Gritting her newly-veneered teeth, Miller vowed to keep going no matter what.  “There's no turning back for me.  If you think I'm going back to the 5 a.m. traffic report in Jax, you're out of your mind.  I'm just hoping for a better life as a reporter.  Is that too much to ask?”

Desperate journalists try to find a story at the border

Despite all she had been through in her torturous journey to the border, Miller said she would still maintain her dignity.  “Katrina Pierson wanted me to interview her live and I told her I'm desperate, but not that desperate,” she said.

Adding to the plight of the thousands of reporters trapped without a story along the Rio Grande, the occasional refugee that does show up at the points of entry are getting wise to the media's need for scary looking brown people.

“I tried to interview some big scary looking Venezuelan yesterday and he told me that he wouldn't go on camera until I agreed to forward his proposal for a seven-part reality series about his journey to the network,” complained ruggedly handsome cable reporter Mel Mush.  Mush admitted that the refugee's arc was “pretty compelling.”

Everyone was critical of the federal government's response to the media crisis at the Southern border.  “Where are the federal officials?  Where are the tours of border facilities?” asked Mush. “The federal response has been totally inadequate to handle the number of live shots that should have beeen anticipated.”

Reporters were also critical of the lack of resources on the border. “I need a mani-pedi and the only place in Eagle Pass that can do it is all booked up,” whined Cooke.

She also rubbished the buses provided by the Department of Homeland Security to transport reporters among the widely-scattered crossing points at the Texas border. “They're school buses!  They're diz-gust-ting!”

Miller was even more outraged. “The government has totally failed to provide adequate shelter.  I had to stay at a Motel Six 50 miles away in Salt Flats.  Do you know what the desert air does to my pores?”

Reporters are at their breaking point at the border

In response to the crisis, Biden Administration officials have airlifted 1,500 Army troops to the region, where they will do nothing but provide pleasing fodder for TV B-rolls.   Mush grudgingly admitted that the moderately exciting visuals of fully uniformed troops walking around in the heat and polishing the Humvees was “better than nothing, but still inadequate to our need.”

As a result of the lackluster federal response, state and other officials are rushing to fill the coverage gap.  Racist screaming Border Patrol union hacks have offered their services for local and national TV hits.  Fat white men in cowboy hats supposedly representing Texas have also been willing to spread anti-immigrant bigotry to any reporter that needs a live interview.

With refugees not flooding the border crossings, the crisis is not expected to abate until Ted Cruz puts on his war surplus commando gear and farts around in a raft on the Rio Grande.

As a last resort, journalists may have no choice but to actually tell their viewers that the efforts of desperate refugees to flee violence and oppression and do the work that Trump voters in a million years wouldn't do is not in fact a crisis or disaster and that anyone who claims otherwise is a cynic or a bigot.

When confronted with that prospect, Cooke said, “ I'd sooner appear on camera without my eyelashes than tell people the truth about immigration.”

No Escape from the Laboratories of "Democracy"

By Legal Editor Scott V. Sandford with
National Correspondent Nellie Bly

We ran out of space last time to bring you up-to-date on the latest outrages perpetrated by what Justice Brandeis once called “laboratories of democracy,” or as you know them, states.

It turns out that not a week goes by in America when Republican-bent state legislatures aren't engaged in subverting not only basic human rights but democracy itself.  And, spoiler alert, the chances of making them stop by voting are, thanks to the corrupt and Republican-owned Supreme Court, between slim and none – and slim just moved to California.

In Missouri, the Republican Attorney General denied all Missourians the right to receive medical care for a life-threatening condition.   Meanwhile, its bent Republican legislature is likely to pass a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans kids:

Despite Freels [a 17-year-old trans woman] testifying that gender-affirming care has made her feel much happier and has helped her heal from depression and suicidal thoughts, Missouri lawmakers seem poised to approve legislation that bars puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender transition surgery for minors.

Ban medical care that parents want for their children? What could go wrong, other than the kids killing themselves? 

And by the way, whatever happened to the Republican braying about “parents' rights?”

Plenty of room on Boot Hill for
future victims of Texas Republicans

Down in the pro-life state of Texas, meanwhile, the state's vague but drastic anti-abortion laws are threatening the health and safety of women forced to march up to death's door before they can be treated for a failed pregnancy:

[Amanda] Zurawski, who was diagnosed with an “incompetent cervix” during her second trimester last year, received an emergency abortion only after her condition deteriorated and she went into septic shock.

“I cannot adequately put into words the trauma and despair that comes with waiting to either lose your own life, your child’s life, or both,” she told The Intercept earlier this year. “For days I was locked in this bizarre and avoidable hell.”...

Texas is one of 13 states nationwide that currently outlaws abortion. The language in its abortion laws is both restrictive and “incredibly vague,” Zurawski said, “and it leaves doctors grappling with what they can and cannot do, what health care they can and cannot provide.”

Last month, the nonprofit Center for Reproductive Rights sued Texas on behalf of Zurawski and four other women who suffered “catastrophic harms” because they were forced to continue carrying their babies. The suit seeks clarity on when and how healthcare providers can legally perform an abortion in the state.

We all know the value that Texas places on human life; if you don't just send your kids to school and then swing by the outlet mall.

By the way, how's all this cruel hard-right extremism playing in Texas?

Abbott, who is in his third term as governor, has never been more powerful in Texas. He enjoys near complete approval from Republican voters — and many independents and South Texas Democrats — for his policies such as border security initiative Operation Lone Star. His political appointees are scattered throughout the state in influential sectors and in courtrooms. Because of redistricting, he and his allies have helped make it harder for a Democrat to win or hold onto seats. And he has managed to fortify his hold on voters and their state representatives regardless of the state’s growing Black, Latino and Asian American population. 

We'll get to the redistricting bit shortly. 

Next stop, Montana, where anti-trans bigotry is more highly valued than democracy.  The state's only trans legislator was silenced, and her constituents disenfranchised because the white Republican men who dominate that august institution had their feelings hurt:

No one is safe from the Montana Legislature

First-term Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr had been prevented from speaking on the chamber floor by the House speaker since April 20, when she refused to apologize for telling colleagues who supported a ban on gender-affirming care for youths that they would have “blood” on their hands. ...

The ruling means ... Zephyr wouldn't get a chance to speak on the House floor unless she's reelected next year.

Republicans have a two-thirds majority in the Montana Legislature and control the governor's office, attorney general's office and almost every other statewide elected office.

“Your rights stop at a legislative supermajority,” Zephyr said.... “If two-thirds of a body decide that you and your constituents don't deserve representation, you don't get it. ... That should be a huge worry for people who want to stand up for democracy."

The standoff between Zephyr and House Republicans originated in a dispute over gender-affirming care for minors, a bill Gov. Greg Gianforte has signed into law. It has evolved to dovetail with a nationwide debate over the robustness of democracy in politically polarizing times. 

That's a somewhat elliptical way to put it, but give ABC News at least one point for pointing out that democracy itself is on the line in these bent Republican states.  By the way, is that the same Greg Gianforte who slugged a reporter for asking him a question he didn't like?  (Yes.)

Our last stop today is North Carolina, where the punchline is delivered: even if voters tire of the hateful
Frankenstein's monsters coming out of these state laboratories, they can't do anything about it because those same states have rigged the vote and the Republican-bent Supreme Court is A-OK with that.

In addition to stomping on the right of women to obtain an abortion after 12 weeks and the rights of parents to decide on gender-affirming care for their children,  the North Carolina legislature now has a golden opportunity to gerrymander itself into perpetual power:

In fact the power to draw the district maps is the power to rule.  For Congressional races, the math breaks down thusly:

North Carolina voters are almost evenly split between the two major parties; Donald J. Trump carried the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote. But the original map of congressional districts approved by the G.O.P. legislature in 2021, and later ruled to be a partisan gerrymander, would probably have given Republicans at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

There is no reason to expect a better outcome with state legislative districts, with the result that 49.9% of the vote would give the Republicans a veto-proof 71% of the seats.

That seems...bad. But not if you're a Republican Supreme Court Justice!

When congressional and legislative maps are redrawn each decade, they often are manipulated to discriminate against communities of color or for partisan gain. Courts, both state and federal, play an important role in keeping these practices in check. Unfortunately, in June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts may not police partisan gerrymandering, leaving that issue to state courts or the political process. 

Unfortunate indeed, as the North Carolina example demonstrates. We know why the real reason the bent Republican court ruled in favor of, um, Republicans, but let's pursue their stated rationale:

John Roberts sure has changed since college

The chief’s [that's John Roberts '76 to his many college friends] opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause doesn’t withstand even basic scrutiny. The court’s majority decided that partisan gerrymandering disputes are “non-justiciable” — that is, the courts can’t intervene in them — because, essentially, courts aren’t equipped to come up with a standard to determine when gerrymanders go too far. Never mind that the lack of what the court calls a “judicially manageable standard” appears to have literally never held the justices back before on any other issue. Never mind also that, as the Brennan Center’s Tom Wolf has pointed out, five different federal courts, relying on the work of respected political scientists, have had little trouble coming up with manageable standards to strike down partisan gerrymanders in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland. To Roberts, it’s all a bunch of “sociological gobbledygook.” 

Speaking of manageable standards, how did Republican Justices (including the easily-confused John Roberts) decide what's a “Major Issue” and thus outside the power of regulatory agencies despite clear statutory authority?  The Brennan Center has an answer: “What that means is vague. But we are already seeing lower court judges using the new doctrine to undo rules they just don’t like. “Major” may mean “if a judge with a lifetime appointment and the Federalist Society on speed dial doesn’t like it.”” Funny how that works.

So short story long: thanks to the bent Republican Supreme Court, in many cases it may be impossible to rescue women, children, and other unfortunates from mayhem in the Laboratories of Democracy merely by voting in state elections.  It will require litigation, but most of all we will need a concerted national effort to replace every Republican legislator and Justice with non-corrupt non-craven Democrats who don't mingle with billionaire plutocrats under the benign gaze of...Adolf Hitler.

Most of all, it takes recognition that we've got a problem here.