As much as possible I try to base my commentary on current events -- on things which people presumably are thinking about because they have been covered recently by the mainstream news media. Last week, unfortunately, there was hardly anything on the television screens besides scenes of the public lamentation, breast-beating, and garment-rending associated with the latest death in America's rottenest family -- well, second rottenest. I am sure that something newsworthy must have happened during the week, but it was crowded out by the Kennedy circus.
I was amazed at the extent of the spectacle: the expressions of grief from all the major politicians and media celebrities, the sidewalk interviews with the lemmings and couch potatoes of various hues who had come out to gawk at the empty Kennedy apartment in New York. It was as if the emperor had died, when in fact it was only an arrogant, puffed-up rich boy who published a slick, shallow, yuppie magazine as a hobby. It reminded me a bit of the public and media reaction to the death of Princess Di last year. She also was a bird-brained non-entity, but she was rich and glamorous, and the rabble identified with her -- as apparently also with John Kennedy, and so the media and the politicians played along. Or maybe it was the other way around. Some media spokesmen even gushed that the Kennedys are "America's royal family." This reaction to Kennedy's death is an interesting phenomenon which may merit some commentary later.

All I could think about at the time, however, was that taking a ride with a Kennedy has been bad luck for a number of young women. I guess some people still remember Mary Jo Kopechne and Chappaquiddick, but one never hears about the 17-year-old girl whose back was broken when a car driven by another drunken Kennedy overturned. Well, having enough money to pay off the families of drowned and crippled girls has been important to the Kennedys, I guess. At least, this time the responsible party didn't survive to kill or cripple again.

The big news immediately before the Kennedy circus was the triumphal visit of Ehud Barak to the United States. All of the politicians in Washington were scrambling to do homage. There was one state dinner or diplomatic banquet after another for the visiting potentate from Israel. Bill Clinton followed him around like an obedient puppy. This toad-like little Hebrew with his barely intelligible English was being presented by the media as the great hope for peace in the Middle East: a wonderful improvement, we were told, over the previous top Hebrew, Benyamin Netanyahu. How many times before have we heard this line?

Well, there's no need for me to go into the details of Barak's grand tour over here. I'm sure that all of you saw that on television until you were sick of it. The Barak visit does serve to remind us of the absolute and total corruption of the gang running our country, however. On July 18 Barak was interviewed on NBC's program "Meet the Press." During that interview he announced that none of the Palestinian refugees who had fled from their homes during Israeli ethnic cleansing programs would be permitted to return. That announcement received nothing but smiles from the interviewers, and later it received nothing but smiles from Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and other members of the Clinton gang, who still were patting themselves on the back for having bombed Serbia into submission, ostensibly so that Albanian refugees could return to their homes in Serbia's Kosovo province.

The Clinton gang would like for everyone to believe that its war against Serbia was based on its opposition to ethnic cleansing and its determination not to let the Serbs get away with chasing Albanians back to Albania. But when the Jews in Israel do exactly what the Serbs are accused of doing -- only more so, because whereas the Serbs chased Albanians out of Serbia and back to Albania, the Jews had chased Palestinians out of Palestine in order to seize Palestinian land -- when the Jews engage in ethnic cleansing the Clinton gang has not even a reprimand for them. Instead Mr. Clinton told Barak during his visit that he would give him $1.2 billion from the U.S. Treasury to compensate Israel for the expenses involved in administering conquered Palestinian territory. Mr. Clinton didn't announce this to the American taxpayers who'll get the bill for this latest handout to Israel. Instead he whispered it to Barak, who told the Israeli media, which trumpeted the news triumphantly to the Jews of Israel in the Hebrew-language press over there. The $1.2 billion from the American taxpayers will be used to build roads linking illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory and to provide additional military security for those illegal settlements, according to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. Finally the news appeared in a few newspapers in this country, quoting Yediot Ahronot.

There's other news relative to the Clinton-Barak relationship which never has appeared in the controlled media over here. For example, there's the growing status in Israel of the tomb of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein. It has become an Israeli national shrine, a sort of second Wailing Wall, with thousands of religious Jews flocking there to worship and pay their respects. Baruch Goldstein, remember, is the Jew from Brooklyn who went to Israel so obsessed with Jewish racial hatred against the Palestinians that he slaughtered 29 of them in February 1994 while they were praying at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. Goldstein sneaked up behind the Palestinians while they were kneeling in prayer and opened fire with an assault rifle, killing 29 of them and wounding another 60. The armed Jewish guards outside the mosque did not try to stop him nor did they think it odd for a Jew to carry an assault rifle into a mosque. In Israel many Jews carry assault rifles in public; it is only in America that the Jews want to ban assault rifles. Goldstein was killed by the surviving, unarmed Palestinians in the mosque while he was attempting to reload his rifle.

Goldstein became an instant national hero to the Jews, and many Jewish tourists from America make a pilgrimage to his tomb near Hebron. The tomb bears an inscription in Hebrew which in English reads: "He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah, and its land." The growing number of tourists and religious Jews attracted to Goldstein's tomb has caused a public debate in Israel: on the one hand there are the Israelis who are worried that the public worship of a mass-murderer might not be good for Israel's image in the United States if the goyim -- the Gentiles -- who are financing Israel through their foreign aid payments ever find out what's going on, and on the other hand there are those Israelis who want to see the Goldstein cult continue to grow because they are certain that the goyim are too stupid ever to find out what's going on.

This debate has been reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from time to time during the past five years, but the controlled mass media in the United States have carefully avoided the issue. Mr. Clinton, of course, was fully aware of this debate during Barak's visit -- he is briefed daily on such matters by the National Security Agency and the CIA -- but he certainly did not raise the issue with Barak during the latter's visit. Instead Clinton was very busy urging the Congress to enact an expanded "hate crimes" law that every Jewish group in the United States has been demanding. I suppose that it would have been insensitive of Clinton to raise the Baruch Goldstein issue at a time when the Jews were all beating the drums for more severe punishments for Gentiles who commit so-called "hate crimes." Anyway, he didn't.

Another Israeli issue which has been kept out of the mass media in America and out of the public consciousness here is what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon these days. Israel, of course, still maintains an occupation army inside southern Lebanon which has been there since Israel's murderous invasion of that country in 1982. The Israelis also finance, arm, and give orders to a gang of Christian Lebanese cut-throats called the Southern Lebanese Army, or SLA. The SLA does much of Israel's dirty work of terror and assassination in southern Lebanon. One of the regular tasks the Jews have assigned to the SLA is the kidnapping of hostages, who are held in a concentration camp in southern Lebanon until such time as the Jews may want to engage in a prisoner exchange with one or another group of Palestinian or Islamic freedom fighters. The Jews refer to these kidnap victims as "bargaining chips." The camp where the SLA keeps the hostages for the Israelis is notorious in Lebanon for the torture which takes place there. Occasionally hostages escape or are exchanged for Mossad agents who have been caught in any Middle Eastern country, and these former hostages have told their stories to journalists in other countries. They also have told their stories to American journalists, but these stories are never permitted to appear in print in America. Most Americans don't even realize that the Israelis still have an occupation army on Lebanese territory. But we all heard Ehud Barak congratulate Bill Clinton for his role in stamping out what Barak referred to as "Serb aggression." That "aggression," of course, was the Serb effort to restore order inside their own country after an insurrection by the so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army." It's nice to see that Mr. Barak has plenty of what the Jews proudly call "chutzpah."

None of these things I've just mentioned in relation to Ehud Barak's visit to the United States are ancient history. They are all things which are happening now: Barak's statement that the Palestinian refugees the Jews ethnically cleansed when they seized Palestinian land will not be permitted to return to their homes is a statement about current Israeli policy; the statement was made just a few days ago, while Mr. Clinton was fawning over Mr. Barak and throwing a state banquet for him on the White House lawn. The debate in Israel about whether the growing cult associated with the tomb of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein is a good thing or not is going on right now and was going on while Barak was making his triumphal tour of the United States. And Palestinian hostages kidnapped by the Southern Lebanon Army at the behest of Israel are being tortured now, today, and Ehud Barak is the man in charge of the kidnapping and torture.

So perhaps you believe I'm reminding you of these things because I like to beat up on Israel. Really, that isn't my principal reason. I don't especially need to beat up on Israel because Israel already is despised by decent and knowledgeable people almost everywhere. Of course, that doesn't include the people in the media and the government in this country, or America's couch potatoes, who don't listen to American Dissident Voices broadcasts anyway.

The reason these things I've mentioned today are interesting to us is not because of what they tell us about Israel or Ehud Barak, but because of what they tell us about the mass media and the government here. With the exception of the question about Palestinian refugees which was asked Barak in his July 18 interview on Meet the Press, the controlled news media in the United States have kept quiet about all these things. And even Barak's breathtakingly arrogant statement on Meet the Press that Palestinian refugees who had been ethnically cleansed by the Israelis would not be permitted to return to their homes -- even this really didn't hurt the Jews appreciably.

To get even the simplest message into the consciousness of the average American voter, it has to be repeated at least 14 times. He needs to have Tom Brokaw explain to him, every night for at least two weeks, that Ehud Barak has the same policy toward refugees that Slobodan Milosevic had, ostensibly the policy for which we bombed Serb schools and Serb hospitals mercilessly before invading Serbia so that we could force the Serbs to permit the return of refugees to their homes. He has to see the disapproving expression on Brokaw's face and hear the disapproving tone in Brokaw's voice to understand that Ehud Barak's policy of ethnic cleansing in Palestine makes Barak a bad man, like it made Milosevic a bad man. He has to see a TV reporter interviewing passersby on the sidewalk and hearing their disapproving opinions before he feels it safe to have a disapproving opinion of Barak's policy himself. And after all of this preparation he then needs to be led by the hand to the conclusion that the sauce which is good for the goose is also good for the gander. He needs to be told explicitly that his government should not be giving billions of dollars every year to Israel for doing the same thing we bombed and invaded Serbia for; that the Clinton administration should not be hosting White House banquets for Ehud Barak while pursuing Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal. If he's not told these things explicitly and repeatedly the average American voter won't get it.

But Mr. Clinton certainly gets it. Everyone in a policymaking position in the Clinton government gets it. Everyone in an editorial position in the news media gets it. These people are crooked, but they're not stupid. They are criminals, but they do understand what they're doing. And it's important for us to understand that they understand what they're doing.

I don't want to insult your intelligence by telling you this 14 times, but I'll tell you just one more time now, because it is important. The government we have in Washington now -- this monstrous thing which has mutated and devolved from the government set up by the Founding Fathers of this country -- cannot and should not be reformed or repaired or salvaged. It should be pulled down and have a stake driven through its heart. Everyone who is a part of it should be dealt with in the same way. You don't reason with people like Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. You don't explain to a Senator Kennedy or an Al Gore or to a judge of the Supreme Court or to any other Washington politician or bureaucrat that his policies are harmful to America. He will simply think that you are crazy. I mean, who cares about what's harmful to America? That's completely irrelevant to the people in Washington. If you want to make an impression on anyone in Washington today, you must convince him that you are willing and able either to hurt him or to help him.