No doubt, for a large number of Americans, it is a good enough excuse: “Gasoline prices could rise to about $9 per gallon if the United States withdraws troops from Iraq prematurely, Rep. Jon Porter said he was told on a trip to Iraq that ended this week,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. “To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave,” said the Nevada Congress critter.

Of course, it hardly matters that genocide is well underway in Iraq—more than a million Iraqis have lost their lives, thanks to the U.S. imposed “liberation,” according to an estimation produced by Just Foreign Policy, based on results by the Lancet and Iraq Body Count—but naturally this is of little concern to the average American worried about an escalating gas bill for his SUV or pickup truck… and that is precisely why Jon Porter mentioned it.

It should be remembered that Porter chaired the Hill & Knowlton front group, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, responsible for parading a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl—known only by her first name of Nayirah—before a complicit corporate media prior to Bush Senior’s invasion of Iraq in 1991. “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” Nayirah lied. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S.


Once again, Jon Porter, acting the part well as a fear and hate monger, is attempting to sell us a passel of disinformation in response to the feeble and weak-kneed attempts by Democrats to put an end to the “war” (invasion and occupation) prior to the election.

“As lawmakers warm up for a renewal of the Iraq war debate in the fall, Porter accused Democrats of failing to offer solutions to the war and avoiding a debate on the ramifications of withdrawal,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal continues. According to Porter, “some Democratic organizations, including the Searchlight Leadership Fund operated by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., have funded anti-war groups. The Searchlight Leadership Fund made $5,000 donations to VoteVets.Org in 2006 and again earlier this year, according to federal records.” In response, “Democrats claim that organizations defending President Bush’s war strategy, such as Vets for Freedom or the newly formed Freedom’s Watch, are fronts linked to the Bush administration whose aim is to attack Democrats and boost GOP fortunes in Congress.”

But never mind. Democrats are so disordered and politically enervated they will not be able to muster the two-thirds vote required to defeat a commander and decider guy veto of any effort to impose a withdrawal timetable. “President Bush is about to ask Congress for $50 billion more to keep fighting the war in Iraq. He is betting—almost certainly correctly—that the Democrats will give him a rough time over the money, probably try to attach timetables for withdrawal to the bill and ultimately give in and pass it,” the Cincinnati Post notes.

In other words, Democrats, through lack of intestinal fortitude and no shortage of felonious complicity, are guilty as the perfidious neocons for the continued mass murder in Iraq, now well surpassing a million souls. Indeed, the “war” will continue and—if the neocons have their day—Iran will be thrown into the depraved mix. In the coming months, Democrats will dutifully line up behind Hillary, on record—emphasized before the AIPAC gathered—as wanting to confront Iran, that is to say shock and awe it back to the Stone Age, although Paleolithic humans did not endure depleted uranium and epidemic leukemia.

In normal, more humane, less Bushzarro times, the lies of the neocon Jon Porter would be met with sardonic derision. Instead, the corporate media, ever compliant, allows this scurrilous neocon to peddle continued and apparently without-end mass murder and egregious crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, as recent experience demonstrates, Porter’s latest admonition—the nation will fork out nine bucks a gallon at the pumps if the U.S. withdraws from the Iraqi killing fields—will work fine and dandy, as America contains no shortage of ignoramuses almost completely bereft of even the most rudimentary knowledge when it comes to politics, history, and even basic geography.