Michael Dell: “I’m smiling because I force Lone Star peasants to pay my property taxes!”

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A version of this article was first published by The Nation…

For all those feeling the pinch this Tax Day, rest assured America’s wealthiest one percent have no idea what you’re going through. Not only have they shaved over a $100 billion off their income taxes thanks to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, but, thanks to misuse of agricultural tax breaks, many did not have to pay their property taxes, either.

Take Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers and the second-richest Texan, who qualified for an agricultural property tax break on his sprawling 1,757-acre residential ranch in suburban Austin and saved over $1 million simply because his family and friends sometimes use the land as a private hunting preserve to shoot deer. Or take billionaire publisher Steve Forbes, who got more than a 90 percent property tax reduction on hundreds of acres of his multimillion dollar estate in upscale Bedminister, New Jersey, just by putting a couple of cows out to pasture. They are not alone. All across the country, a huge number of America’s wealthiest are tapping into agricultural tax breaks—and none of them have to do any real farming to qualify.

Not only are agricultural tax breaks allowing wealthy landowners to shift their tax burden onto other less-affluent taxpayers, but they are also helping bankrupt public schools, which derive the bulk of their funding from local property taxes.

Agricultural tax breaks got their start in the 50s and 60s, as a response to the explosive growth of suburban development, which was encroaching on farmland and raising agricultural property values to the point where farmers were having paying their tax bills. Fearing that this would pressure farmers into selling out to developers, states began granting exemptions that allowed agricultural land to be assessed at rates well below market value. The practice, called use-value assessment, is today used by all but one of the fifty states to artificially deflate the value of farmland, frequently by 90 percent or more.

The plan looked good on paper, but in the real world it was quickly manipulated to steer money to the rich.

Steve Forbes: “Mmmm-ummmm. Check out the tax-saving udder on that baby!”

Many states expanded the definition of “agricultural land” beyond land that was farmed to land that simply had not yet been developed. In South Carolina, all it takes is five acres of trees to qualify for a tax exemption. New Jersey requires that a landowner have five acres, but also sell $500 of agricultural goods a year from their farm. Steve Forbes and his wife, Sabrina, qualify for their exemption by breeding show cows on their 450-acre Bedminster estate. “You don’t make money selling hamburger meat. You make money breeding show cows; that’s the name of the game,” Forbes told Fortune magazine in 1996. Florida requires a couple of cows or a herd of goats, which don’t have to be on the property all the time. Texan law is so broadly defined that the PGA Tour golf resort in San Antonio has been trying get recognized as a “nature preserve” to get a farm tax break.

“You can go out and cut some brush, put out some feed and count the deer once a year and qualify,” a tax appraiser from Travis County in Texas told The American-Statesman.

That’s exactly what Michael Dell did with the suburban Austin ranch he uses as a second home. Periodically hunting and maintaining a “well-managed deer herd” reduced the property’s 2005 market value from $71.4 million to an agricultural value of $290,000, which saves him—and costs Texas—$1.2 million a year.

It’s all perfectly legal under Texan law. As long as property owners stick to the state guidelines, country officials have no right to deny them agricultural status. Korea’s Samsung Electronics qualified for a “wildlife management” agricultural tax exemption on 54 acres of land outside its semiconductor plant in the Northeast Austin by putting up a few birdhouses, eradicating ants, and taking a wildlife “census,” which reduced its tax bill from  $21,080 to just over $135 (a reduction of over 99.4%), reported the Wall Street Journal in 2007. If wildlife isn’t your thing, dedicating a few acres to Christmas trees is enough to qualify for a property tax exemption under “timber production,” which is exactly what Hewlett-Packard opted for on its corporate campus in Houston. The company saved half a million dollars in property taxes in 2004, despite the fact that it openly plans to develop that land.

The exemption is such a money-saver that it’s hard to find rich Texans who aren’t moonlighting as farmers on their estates, and that includes President George W. Bush.

Bush has used the farm-tax dodge scheme on at least two properties in the last two decades. When he was governor of Texas, Bush’s lakeside home near Athens, nestled in a secluded pine forest shared with a few other high-powered homeowners, lost its agricultural tax exemption, but was then promptly redesignated as “scenic land” under a similar law and taxed at massively reduced value of $101,770. In 1998, his tax bill was a measly $543.07. (The owner of a $100,000 home in a drab tract development on the very outskirts of Austin would pay somewhere around $3,000.)

After a hard day’s work executing mentally retarded minorities, Texas Governor George W. Bush sought refuge and solace at his rustic lakeside farm, comforted by the fact that he paid no property taxes…

Bush was cleared for another agricultural tax exemption a few years later on his new 1,582-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, which reduced its taxable value from $2.1 million to $950,000, according to an AP investigation. In 2003, the year American invaded Iraq, the tax break saved Bush $23,679 in property taxes. Bush might have been a disastrous president, but he sure is good at tax-avoidance schemes—which is good for him, considering that Texas has one of the highest property tax rates in the nation.

While there is no definitive national study about the use of agricultural tax breaks, a patchwork of reports and investigations carried out by local news organizations over the past decade makes it clear that the exemptions are not being used as originally intended. All across the country, agricultural land is being used by wealthy landowners to dodge paying their share of property taxes. And it has been going on for decades.

Here are just a few examples:

*  In the mid-1970s, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was approved for an agricultural exemption by agreeing to not develop his 688-acre Santa Barbara ranch, which shrunk his tax bill from $12,600 to $1,100. The ranch was classified as farmland, despite the dubious fact that it sat on land “too rugged for serious ranching and almost impossible to farm,” reported UPI in 1974.

*  In Florida, Walt Disney World planted a few trees and flowers and put some cows to pasture on its 1,600 acres of undeveloped land adjacent to the theme park. The company told the AP that it planned to develop the land in the future. In the meantime, Disney was content to pay taxes on the $194-million property as if it was worth only $12.3 million. Disney isn’t the only one taking advantage of Florida’s tax loophole. In 2004, two-thirds of the top 60 tax exemption recipients in South Florida were not farmers.

*  A recent investigation by New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press found widespread abuse of agricultural tax breaks throughout the Garden State, where “fake farmers” qualified for tax exemptions simply by growing weeds or letting cows roam on their front lawns.  Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Forbes and the billionaire heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune (one of whom is trying to build a helicopter pad on his “farm”) are just a few of New Jersey’s megarich who pay pennies on the dollar in property taxes.

Just another day at the Reagan Ranch: the Gipper and Papa Bush swap tax-dodging tips over a light lunch…

While there are plenty of real farmers who legitimately claim the tax exemption on their land, every year tens of billions of dollars in state and municipal revenue is lost due to farm tax breaks claimed by those who abuse the loophole.

California’s Monterey County loses about $1 billion a year due to a farm tax reduction program, in which 30 percent of all private land in the state is enrolled. In Texas, the state comptroller said that $409 million in agriculture tax savings goes to out-of-state interests, and $500 million goes to Texan families with incomes greater than than $90,000. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a study of a few counties revealed that half the land receiving agricultural tax breaks was owned by real estate developers. The report even included hilarious photographs of these subsidized “farms” being advertised as future shopping centers and tract home developments. One of them had a big yellow For Sale sign that read: “Great Restaurant Location.”

But while wealthy landowners and developers reap massive tax breaks, average Americans are forced to foot the bill. To recoup revenue lost to tax breaks given to phony farms, municipal governments have simply ratcheted up their taxation on the rest of us. Counties have raised taxes on non-agricultural property, cut services, and increased sales tax rates. (In fact, we can thank farm tax breaks for giving us the gift of the regressive sales tax, which has become the biggest source of tax revenue for local governments, outpacing property taxes. All across the nation, the rise in sales taxes coincides with the appearance—and expansion—of property breaks for the wealthy landowners.)

Raising taxes and cutting services for the benefit of speculators? Sounds a lot like an IMF austerity program designed to squeeze every last drop of money from impoverished nations. And in many ways that is exactly what agricultural tax breaks are doing to municipal governments by sucking money out of public services, including public education.

In Texas, agricultural tax breaks cost public schools $1.5 billion in lost revenue, according to a 2005 investigation by the Houston Chronicle. Just the tax break Michael Dell got on his $71.4 million suburban Austin ranch cost the local school district $1.2 million in lost revenue in 2005. But instead of trying to recoup these funds, Texas is considering cutting at least $3 billion from public education in order to close the state’s staggering $25 billion budget shortfall.

Rural areas, which have a smaller and less diverse tax base, are being disproportionately affected. In southern Pennsylvania, the tax shift from agricultural exemptions increased taxes on non-agricultural properties by 27 percent, said State Rep. Bryan Cutler. But even that has not been enough.

Two school districts in Rep. Cutler’s district each lose roughly $5 million a year in funds as a result of an increasing number of properties being enrolled in the state’s “Clean & Green” agricultural tax exemption program. For one of the districts, the loss represents nearly 10 percent of its annual budget—or $1,200 for each one of its students.

“The poorest population in our county is bearing the responsibility to provide green space for the county while our wealthiest areas bear little of the responsibility to assure there is green space in the county,” wrote Thomas L. Newcome, superintendent for the Octorara School District, in a testimony prepared for the Pennsylvania’s state legislature in 2009, while it was debating a bill that would help offset the drop in municipal revenues due to agricultural tax breaks. “The very people that pay more to provide a resource for others – their children receive less.”

Pay more; get less. That’s the brutal reality facing kids and parents today. And it is only going to get worse.

The financial threat to public education and other government services has only become more acute since the collapse of the financial and real estate markets. Just in 2010, home values dropped by $1.7 trillion, further eroding the property tax base that public schools rely on for revenue.

You would think that closing this loophole would be a high priority for cash-strapped states and municipalities. But apparently not. A few states, including California and Denver, plan on making minor adjustments to their farm property tax rates, but not much else. And it is not a partisan issue, either. It seems state legislators from both parties are more keen on slashing social spending, perfectly willing to plunge a whole generation of Americans into ignorance and poverty just so that a small number of millionaires and billionaires can keep dodging their property taxes.

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Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s award-winning exposé: “Manhattan’s Welfare Kings: How Billionaires Turned Farms Into Personal Tax Havens and Petty Cash Machines, Allowing Them to Give Less, While Taking More.” Then check out his reporting on California’s water wars: “The Story of How Beverly Hills Billionaire Farmers Stewart and Lynda Resnick Have Privatized California’s Water Supply.”

Black rat snake in Washington Times newsroom.

This article is reprinted from Consortium News

As an investigative journalist, I’m not much for catchy political metaphors, but the revelation that snakes and rodents are infesting the Washington Times building as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s newspaper sinks into a financial swamp does have some poetic justice about it.

After all, for 28 years, the right-wing Washington Times has sent disinformation slithering through the U.S. political system while creating a nest for propagandists who have befouled American democracy with irrationality and dirty tricks.

Indeed, one could say that Moon’s newspaper pioneered the modern style of deceptive “journalism” that is the daily fare on Fox News, angry talk radio and right-wing blogs.

The immediate cause of the Washington Times’ financial collapse is said to be the bitter succession fight among children of the 90-year-old Unification Church founder who is no longer capable of maintaining personal control over his global religious-political-business empire.

That empire has now split into competing factions, with one of Moon’s children, Justin Moon, who is in charge of the Asian operations, deciding to slash the church’s massive subsidy to the Washington Times headed by another son, Preston Moon.

Rev. Moon “The Messiah” and wife

Nicholas Chiaia, one of the two remaining members of the newspaper’s board of directors, told the Washington Post that the Washington Times is up for sale. “We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times,” he said.

Meanwhile, staffers who have survived a series of draconian layoffs report that snakes and mice have slipped into the newspaper’s building because the owners can’t afford exterminators to combat the infestations.

“There was a three-foot-long black snake in the main conference room the other day,” said reporter Julia Duin. “We have snakes in the newsroom.”

So, although some deep-pocket conservative might step up and save the American Right’s flagship newspaper, it appears that the Washington Times’ extraordinary run as a foreign-controlled and suspiciously funded propaganda vehicle may soon be over.

A Curious Case

It has long been amazing that Official Washington has been so blasé about the curious case of the Washington Times, where a Korean theocrat – known for brainwashing his followers and for maintaining close ties with international drug cartels and foreign intelligence agencies – has been allowed to spend billions of unregulated dollars to influence U.S. political decision-making.

The fact that Moon wrapped himself in “conservative” political garb – and was quick to denounce any investigations of his organization as “religious bigotry” – helped fend off inquiries into exactly where his money was coming from.

But what proved most important was how Moon made himself useful to Ronald Reagan, the Bush Family and other Republican heavy-hitters – often by putting into play propaganda smearing their political enemies. These Republicans, in turn, helped protect Moon, at least since the late 1970s.

During the Carter administration, the congressional “Korea-gate” probe into South Korean influence-buying in Washington revealed Moon’s foreign intelligence ties and some of his criminal activities, leading to his conviction on tax fraud charges in 1982.

In that same year, however, Moon took steps to insulate himself from further inquiries, most notably by launching the Washington Times. Since then, Moon’s empire – from its local fundraising scams to its international money-laundering – has escaped any serious government examination.

It didn’t even matter when Church insiders, including Moon’s former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, provided first-hand evidence of systematic criminality. In an era dominated by Republican control of the federal government, U.S. authorities never seemed to put two and two together.

Though Moon’s operations in both Asia and South America were linked to major crime syndicates including the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels, federal prosecutors and congressional committees chose to look the other way.

That way Moon was allowed to continue pouring an estimated $100 million a year into his newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions went to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, including George H.W. Bush; and to bail other Republican political allies out of financial troubles.

“Make a wish, Messiah!”

When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed former church insiders who explained how Moon’s U.S. business operations, such as restaurants and real estate deals, served to launder overseas money that his followers would first sneak past U.S. Customs, a practice confirmed by Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law.

In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.

“The Unification Church was a cash operation. I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.

“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”

Personal Confession

Mrs. Moon even pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.

Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.

“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled. “I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. … I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws.”

U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.

Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers” who smuggled the money in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.

Despite Nansook Hong’s revelations, which corroborated longstanding claims by other Moon insiders, no known criminal investigation ensued.

There is also the question of where the mysterious money originated. Some Moon watchers believe much of the cash came from scams of superstitious Japanese widows who were sold miniature pagodas and other ornaments dedicated to their dead husbands.

Yet, while the Japanese scams might explain part of Moon’s fortune, others who have looked into Moon’s operation suspect that a major source of money derived from Moon’s close relationships with underworld figures in Asia and South America.

Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted by one of Moon’s early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil, who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations on improving bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.

The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.

The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in Cold War battles with European communists.

Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Far-Right Extremism

Kim Jong-Pil’s contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to Moon, who had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Yakuza, a book by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

“Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Japanese branch of the Unification Church” and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.

Moon’s church was active in the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with ex-Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American “death squads.”

Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.

The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa and Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, according to the Andersons.

The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that “would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.

Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the Allies, the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War. They helped both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.

Though some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, others managed to make their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.

Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.

Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.

French Connection

Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States.

Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also “took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance,” Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.

During President Richard Nixon’s original “war on drugs,” U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.

However, by the time the French Connection was severed, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.

Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations.

Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.

During this time of transition, Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires, but he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.

Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.

“As an international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”

Cocaine Coup

In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivian military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. Moon’s WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.

Right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists as they collaborated with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.

Klaus Barbie

The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.

One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.

After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”

According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.

Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.

“The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS – sold themselves to the cocaine barons,” German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. “The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.”

A month after the coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.

As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.

On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.

In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.” According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an “armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.

Moon’s Escape

But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.

“The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann reported.

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too.

Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.

Ex-Gestapo official Barbie, known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1991.

But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington.

Yet, where Moon got his cash remained one of Washington’s deepest mysteries – and one that few U.S. conservatives wanted to solve.

“Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson.

While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities, Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.

In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.” [Clarin, July 7, 1996]

Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contra movement, both permeated with drug smugglers. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

On the Offensive

Moon’s organization also used the Washington Times and its political clout in the nation’s capital to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate Moon-connected criminal activities.

In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking, they came under attack from the Times.

An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”

When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra-drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt.

“Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan administration efforts to get at the truth.

“Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe,” said a Jan. 21, 1987, Times article that opened with the assertion: “Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said.”

Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade.

“It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989.

“In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”

Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.

“Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said.

“These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period.

“Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”

The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.

In short, Vice President Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.

If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.

By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President – and bought some cover for Moon’s drug-connected right-wing allies, too.

Mounting Evidence

The resistance of the Reagan and the first Bush administrations prevented anything like a complete story of the contra-drug scandal from emerging in a timely fashion.

However, the evidence – eventually assembled by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies – now indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers who tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war.

Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, sharing some of their drug profits with the contras as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.

Based on official investigations, we now know that the contra-connected smugglers included Bolivians, the Medellin cartel, Panama’s government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administrations.

For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations stated, “There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms.”

The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.

The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.

“In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further,” CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to label the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as “misinformation.”

The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz – when he investigated in the mid-to-late 1990s – found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.

Also, by keeping the names of the participants censored when the documents finally were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the “U.S. religious organization” had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.

Studied Disinterest

Over the past quarter century – as Moon invested heavily in prominent Republicans – this pattern of government disinterest in his illicit operations remained one consistency. That disinterest wasn’t even shaken when disenchanted Moon insiders went public with confessions of their own first-hand involvement in criminal conspiracies.

Besides Nansook Hong’s account of money-laundering, other disaffected Moon disciples told similar stories.

For instance, Maria Madelene Pretorious, a former Unification Church member who worked at Moon’s Manhattan Center, a New York City music venue and recording studio, testified at a court hearing in Massachusetts that in December of 1993 or January of 1994, one of Moon’s sons, Hyo Jin Moon, returned from a trip to Korea “with $600,000 in cash which he had received from his father. …

“Myself along with three or four other members that worked at Manhattan Center saw the cash in bags, shopping bags.”

In an interview with me in the mid-1990s, Pretorious said Asian church members would bring cash into the United States where it would be circulated through Moon’s business entities as a way to launder it.

At the center of this financial operation, Pretorious said, was One-Up Corp., a Delaware-registered holding company that owned many Moon enterprises including the Manhattan Center and New World Communications, the parent company of the Washington Times.

“Once that cash is at the Manhattan Center, it has to be accounted for,” Pretorious said. “The way that’s done is to launder the cash. Manhattan Center gives cash to a business called Happy World which owns restaurants. … Happy World needs to pay illegal aliens. … Happy World pays some back to the Manhattan Center for ‘services rendered.’ The rest goes to One-Up and then comes back to Manhattan Center as an investment.”

In 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew the whistle on another Moon money-laundering scheme, in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each.

The money from the women went into the account of an anonymous association called Cami II, which was controlled by Moon’s Unification Church. In one day, Cami II received $19 million and, by the time the parade of women ended, the total had swelled to about $80 million.

It was not clear where the money originated, nor how many other times Moon’s organization has used this tactic – known as “smurfing” – to transfer untraceable cash into Uruguay.

Authorities did not push the money-laundering investigation, apparently out of deference to Moon’s political clout and fear of disrupting Uruguay’s banking industry. However, other critics condemned Moon’s operations.

“The first thing we ought to do is clarify to the people [of Uruguay] that Moon’s sect is a type of modern pirate that came to the country to perform obscure money operations, such as money laundering,” said Jorge Zabalza, who was a leader of the Movimiento de Participacion Popular. “This sect is a kind of religious mob that is trying to get public support to pursue its business.”

While Moon’s criminal enterprises may have been operating at one level, Moon’s political influence-buying was functioning at another, as he spread around billions of dollars to the top echelons of Washington power.

For instance, when the New Right’s direct-mail whiz Richard Viguerie fell on hard times in the late 1980s, Moon had a corporation run by his lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s properties for $10 million. [See Orange County Register, Dec. 21, 1987; Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1989]

Moon also used the Washington Times and its affiliated publications to create seemingly legitimate conduits to funnel money to individuals and companies. In another example of Moon’s helpful largesse, the Washington Times hired Viguerie to conduct a pricy direct-mail subscription drive.

Falwell’s Savior

Another case of saving a right-wing icon occurred when the Rev. Jerry Falwell was facing financial ruin over the debts piling up at Liberty University.

But the fundamentalist Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, got a last-minute bail-out in the mid-1990s ostensibly from two Virginia businessmen, Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas, who used their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation to snap up a large chunk of Liberty’s debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value.

Falwell rejoiced and called the moment “the greatest single day of financial advantage” in the school’s history, even though it was accomplished at the disadvantage of many small true-believing investors who had bought the church construction bonds through a Texas company.

But Falwell’s secret benefactor behind the debt purchase was Sun Myung Moon, who was kept in the background partly because of his controversial Biblical interpretations that hold Jesus to have been a failure and because of Moon’s alleged brainwashing of thousands of young Americans, often shattering their bonds with their biological families.

Moon had used his tax-exempt Women’s Federation for World Peace to funnel $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that purchased the school’s debt. I stumbled onto this Moon-Falwell connection by examining the Internal Revenue Service filings of Moon’s front groups.

Jerry Falwell & The Rev. Moon: The Harold & Kumar of right-wing goons

The Women Federation’s vice president Susan Fefferman confirmed that the $3.5 million grant had gone to “Mr. Falwell’s people” for the benefit of Liberty University. [For more on Moon’s funding of the Right, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Moon also used the Women’s Federation to pay substantial speaking fees to former President George H.W. Bush, who gave talks at Moon-sponsored events. In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush said “what really counts is faith, family and friends.”

In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. The former President addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection. Bush had no such qualms. [Washington Post, July 30, 1996]

In fall 1996, Moon needed the ex-President’s help once more. Moon was trying to replicate his Washington Times influence in South America by opening a regional newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo. But South American journalists were recounting unsavory chapters of Moon’s history, including his links to South Korea’s intelligence service and various neo-fascist groups.

Some newspaper articles noted that in the early 1980s, Moon had used friendships with the military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay – which had been responsible for tens of thousands of political murders – to invest in those two countries. There also were allegations of Moon’s links to the region’s major drug traffickers.

Moon’s disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage Moon’s plans for an inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996. “The local press was trying to undermine the event,” complained the church’s internal newsletter, Unification News.

Given the controversy, Argentina’s elected president, Carlos Menem, decided to reject Moon’s invitation to attend.

Trump Card

But Moon had a trump card: the endorsement of an ex-President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Agreeing to speak at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos.

As the headliner at the newspaper’s inaugural gala, Bush saved the day, Moon’s followers gushed. “Mr. Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige,” wrote the Unification News. “Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon] sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring] just a few feet from the podium” where Bush spoke.

“I want to salute Reverend Moon,” Bush declared. “A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about the Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of the Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision [Moon] interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.”

Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers.

“Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory,” the Unification News exulted. “Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments. We knew he would give an appropriate and ‘nice’ speech, but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. … It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven.”

While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s Washington Times as a voice of “sanity” may be a matter of opinion, Bush’s vouching for its editorial independence simply wasn’t true. Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates.

The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that “I have blood on my hands” for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.

But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America.

“The day after,” the Unification News observed, “the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. President.” With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.

After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. “Bush told me he came and charged money to do it,” Menem said. [La Nacion, Nov. 26, 1996]

But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By fall 1996, Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-President also had been earning huge speaking fees as a front man for Moon for more than a year.

Throughout these public appearances for Moon, Bush’s office refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-President. But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000.

Sources close to the Unification Church told me that the total spending on Bush ran into the millions, with one source telling me that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million from Moon’s organization.

The senior George Bush may have had a political motive, too. By 1996, sources close to Bush were saying the ex-President was working hard to enlist well-to-do conservatives and their money behind the presidential candidacy of his son, George W. Bush. Moon was one of the deepest pockets in right-wing circles.

Moon’s pattern of putting into Bush family causes continued into George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2006, Moon again used money-laundering techniques to funnel a donation to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the library. The Chronicle obtained indirect confirmation that Moon’s money was passing through the Houston foundation to the Bush library from Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath.

“President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington,” McGrath said.

But Moon has earned the deepest gratitude of the Bush Family and the Republican Party via his multi-billion-dollar investment in the Washington Times, a powerful propaganda organ that helped the GOP build its political dominance over the past quarter century.

Over those years, the Times has targeted American politicians of the Center and Left with journalistic attacks – sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonated through the broader right-wing echo chamber and often into the mainstream media.

In 2000, the Washington Times was at the center of the assault on Al Gore’s candidacy – highlighting apocryphal quotes by Gore and using them to depict him as either “Lyin’ Al” or delusional. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al Gore vs. the Media.”]

Aiming at Obama

The intervention by Moon’s media outlets into U.S. presidential politics continued into Campaign 2008 when Moon’s online magazine Insight tried to sabotage Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign before it even got started.

The Insight article cited opposition research supposedly dug up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that Obama had attended a fundamentalist Muslim “madrassa” while a child and had sought to conceal his allegiance to Islam.

“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” a source supposedly close to Clinton’s background investigation of Obama told Insight. “The idea is to show Obama as deceptive.”

Insight used no named sources for the allegations, nor did the magazine check out the facts about the school.

After Moon’s online magazine published the “madrassa” story, it quickly spread to the wider audiences of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, and then into the mainstream press. To further the subliminal link between Obama and Islamic terrorism, the New York Post ran its story under the headline “‘Osama’ Mud Flies at Obama.”

“The allegations are completely false,” said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. “To publish this sort of trash without any documentation is surprising, but for Fox to repeat something so false, not once, but many times is appallingly irresponsible.”

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson termed the Insight article “an obvious right-wing hit job by a Moonie publication that was designed to attack Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the same time.” [Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2007]

When CNN checked out the Insight article on Jan. 22, 2007, the story collapsed. The Indonesian school that Obama attended as a child turned out not to be some radical “madrassa” where an extreme form of Islam would be taught, but a well-kept public school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jakarta.

The boys and girls wore school uniforms and were taught a typical school curriculum today as they were 39 years ago when Obama was a student there, while living with his mother in Indonesia, reported CNN correspondent John Vause.

While most of the school’s students are Muslim – Indonesia is a Muslim country, after all – Vause reported that the religious views of other students are respected and that Christian children at the school are taught that Jesus is the son of God.

Though this Moon-financed propaganda may have been debunked, the subliminal doubt was planted about whether Obama might be a secret agent of radical Islam, a theme that has continued to resonate within the right-wing media and the Tea Party movement.

Now, however, it appears that the days of Moon’s news outlets initiating or circulating smears against political enemies may finally be nearing an end. What ultimately has caused the decline of Moon’s money machine – besides the infighting of Moon’s children – remains a mystery, at least to outsiders.

It’s possible that Moon’s lucrative connections to the netherworld of right-wing extremism, drugs and money simply were dependent on his personal relationships – and as they died off, so did his ability to access those financial channels.

It’s possible, too, that the value of Moon’s propaganda operation has been eclipsed by less problematic right-wing media moguls and self-made talk-show hosts who are now rich themselves.

Though Moon played a key early role in building the right-wing echo chamber, other wealthy individuals, from media titan Rupert Murdoch to newly minted multi-millionaires like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, can carry on quite well without the help of a Korean theocrat who thinks he’s the new Messiah.

Still, even the passing of Moon’s Washington Times will not mean that the snakes and other vermin that Moon let loose in the American political system will soon disappear. In fact, they may be more prevalent than ever.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

This article was first published in The eXile on March 6, 2008.

In this post-Russian presidential election issue, while the righteous American editorialists wag their fingers at Russia’s farcical elections, we want to hold up a giant mirror (with loudspeaker attached) across the Atlantic and scream what every sane American has been thinking for nearly a decade now: We’re Embarrassed To Be Americans.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re ashamed not just because America is hypocritical or imperialistic or militaristic or bloodthirsty. Would that we were! If only it were still true, we’d shut our mouths and strut around the world, seizing our rightful booty the way booty-seeking citizens of “the most powerful empire in mankind’s history” (to use one neocon’s description in 2002) oughtta do.

It’s not that America is so evil and bloodthirsty, though it tries hard to be… it’s that America has become the world’s laughingstock, a flash-in-the-pan hyperpower, the Sigue Sigue Sputnik of empires, the Charles Bovary of Great Civilizations. The Bush years have made us so embarrassed to be Americans that even the shameful Carter Years look downright Roman by comparison.

We can already hear you hicks whining, “If yer so darned ashamed of bein’ Amer’can, whyn’tchoo just tern in yer passport then, yuh darned traitor.”

To which we reply, “Nope, we’re gonna keep our passports. We like the idea of wiping our asses on our passports, while at the same time enjoying all of the advantages that U.S. citizenship still affords us, few though they may be.” Nothing gives us more pleasure than hearing you pigs squeal “git the fugg outta my cuntree” cuz the thing is, we are out of your cuntree, and the other thing is, we’ll come back when we damn well feel like it, thanks to our passports, just because we wanna watch you idiots grow giant swarming ulcers at the sight of our ungrateful asses.

So folks—since Americans are all “folks” these days—hold on to your beta-blockers and your ACE inhibitors, because you’re about to face the unpleasant reality of Why You Should Be Ashamed Of Being American Too:

1. Canadian dollar surpasses greenbackThose silly Canadians, remember how Americans used to laugh at them? How cute they looked when they’d resentfully mumble to visiting American tourists, “we’re American, too—you don’t own the name of our continent!” We did own it, though, which is why they were so cute, why they were so funny in all those South Park jokes. Canada was an almost-nation of almost-Americans with an almost currency called a “Canadian dollar,” which was cute, and always worth about 50 American cents. Then, on September 20, 2007, a day that will live in shamefamy, the Canadian dollar passed up the U.S. dollar. People from the United States officially lost their right to call themselves “Americans.” Now when we visit Canada we just say, “We’re from south of the border”—if we can afford to visit Canada, that is.Shame Factor:
   
2. Baptist birthrate. According to recent stats, the U.S. birthrate is rising, and it’s rising fastest among Baptists and Mormons. It’s actually falling for Asians, the most promising demographic. But the dumbest, ugliest, meanest hicks on the planet are breeding like walking catfish, wriggling to new townhouse developments in the nastiest parts of the country like Nevada and Florida. We’ll end with Vegas and Fort Lauderdale shaking hands over the corpse of the last decent American, the pounding of the Tin Spike into the American cadaver.Jimmy Swaggert Factor:
   
3. Fat is the new normal. Last year a Newsweek cover story asked the question, “Is Fat the New Normal?” At least the Nazi’s truth-inversions had a poetic evil about them. America’s truth inversions are just plain depressing. You people are gross, man.John Reed Factor. The fattists are reason enough to defect to Russia and glorify the “stability revolution,” which to us means, “A country where ‘thin’ is still ‘in.’”
4. The Iran War Puss-Out. No country has fucked with America more brazenly than Iran has. They took dozens of American hostages in 1979, funded Hezbollah’s suicide bombing that killed 241 Marines, and now kill American soldiers in Iraq. The whole point of invading Iraq was to put Iran in a vise. But guess what? America doesn’t have enough military power to attack anymore. So we issued a National Intelligence Report saying Iran isn’t really such a big threat… Just like when Kim Jong Il set off his nukes and fired his missiles, we also pretended it was really not such a big deal. What we really said was, “White flag a-risin’!” Yup, “the world’s only superpower” is too weak, too broke, and too afraid to go to war against a primitive third-rate enemy that literally lives in the Dark Ages. The war against the Axis of Evil is over: two bullshit countries caused America to flinch and scream “Uncle!” without ever having to fire a shot.Adam Gadhan Factor: Real Americans like winners, which is why we’re growing out our beards and practicing our Farsi…
   
5. Losing two wars at once. “Vietnam Syndrome” meant one thing: America suffered its first and only defeat in its 200-year history, and it didn’t know how to deal or what it meant. Then in the 90s, America got its George Foreman on, headed back into the war ring, and racked up some wins against, admittedly, a bunch of second-stringers. Enter the 21st-century, a new season, and America is heading into the final rounds of two concurrent defeats, against the two most laughable opponents on planet earth! We’re now the basement team, the doormat of the war league, the Glass Jawed white giant whose only purpose is to launch the careers of new up-and-comers! At least Germany’s 0-2 record came against worthy enemies… But to lose to Iraq and Afghanistan? With America pussing out of another two wars against Iran and North Korea, which we’ve all but forfeited with a default, our loss record is on the verge of a 0-4. We need to double-paper bag our heads over this one.Jane Fonda Factor: Our inner Hanoi Jane says, “Show us a fearsome Taliban mule that we can sit on for the Al Jazeera cameras, and we’ll be there with bells on!”
   
6. Wes Anderson. No one should trigger a healthy nation’s gag reflex as often or as intensely as quirky-moment-machine Wes Anderson. For years we’ve fantasized about the ultimate slo-mo outro to a documentary called Wes Anderson & The Life Arctic: Anderson is placed on a small dinghy with the Wilson brothers (all three of ‘em) and Angelica Huston, then slowly descended from a pastel-colored Finnish ice-breaker. Just as the tears appear in Anderson’s horrified, frost-encrusted eyes, Abba’s “So Long” kicks in, drowning the group’s slow-motion screams for mercy. Anderson went from ass-clown status to the he-must-die list with 2007′s Darjeeling Limited, a vapid film even by his standards that doubled as an effortless insult to India. It’s the film equivalent of a frat boy carving his initials in the Taj Mahal. Anderson had the gall to dedicate the film to Satyajit Ray, who would have spat in Anderson’s face had he lived to enjoy the honor.Bernadine Dohrne Factor: Bring the War Home to Hollywood
   
7. Populism. This is what America does in lieu of actually helping ordinary fuckin’ people: hugs on camera. No cash, but all the hugs you can eat, you lovable fat suckers. From the spread of fake Texas dialect like “you folks” to the comedy of plutocrats defending the middle class on TV while earning sums that the middle class can’t even fathom, populist sentimentality is the all-purpose lubricant, the WD-40, of winner-take-all capitalism. Engels’ remark that anti-Semitism is “the socialism of fools” needs to be updated to apply to American populist sentimentality. A million foreclosures and one televised barn-raising, aka Extreme Makeover, for the most pathetic telegenic family of losers the producers auditioned. There’s a bitter old saying, “They’d cut your head and give you a bandage.” That’s us, baby!Shame Factor:
   
8. Seth McFarlane. It isn’t just that McFarlane’s Family Guy shamelessly plagiarizes from The Simpsons, nor is it just the endless cheap references to bad pop culture icons. Family Guy is much worse and much more evil than that: an anti-Simpsons antidote for zombies who want to get rid of the annoying buzz of vestigial decency in their rotting heads. They want that decency removed, and Family Guy does it non-stop, scene by scene, undoing the unwanted education all those Simpson episodes forced down their throats with a spoonful of sugar. McFarlane’s show reinforces their meanest, dumbest instincts. And it’s a huge hit.Nicholas Berg Factor: We would seriously consider converting to Islam if someone would slowly saw McFarlane’s head off while forcing him to sing the theme song to “Three’s Company,” complete with laugh track.
   
9. Dodge/Chrysler. This company is like the android morph of the millions of fat dumb hick boys infesting America. Like them, it needed special help just to continue its bloated, destructive life. Chrysler has been on welfare since buyers noticed they could actually buy a decent car at a decent price by going Japanese. But instead of getting in shape and actually trying to produce decent cars, Chrysler bet everything it had that Americans are so utterly stupid and childish that they’d come back for huge shiny junkers that would look cool for a few thousand miles, then fall apart. And they were right. Seeing a pattern here?Shame Factor:
   
10. Lame assassins. You hear a lot of stupid things these days. Take, for example, the truism that “Assassination doesn’t work.” Bullshit. It worked so well nobody even remembers. Un-kill Bobby Kennedy, and America’s entire history changes. Except you can’t un-kill people. All you can do is kill some of the monsters. It’s not that hard to do. Two bullets in the chest, one in the head, and Nixon will die, Attila the Hun will die, any damn human will die. The only problem is that all our assassins are idiots. The Unabomber came close; if he’d only killed more timber company lobbyists and left the useless professors to their dull fates, he’d have been a true hero. Will no one rid us of these lice? Is there a single Leftist with balls in this country?Sara Jane Moore Factor: The patron saint of inept assassins, Sara Jane Moore paved the way for slapstick morons like John Hinckley and a host of suicide-light-plane divers.
    
11. The Loss of Latin America. So who’s the idiot that forgot to pay off the Palace Guards in Caracas in 2002? America is so inept that we can’t even pull off a coup in what FDR called “our little neighborhood down there.” Yeah, we managed to get Aristide out of there without breaking a sweat, but Haiti doesn’t count. It’s been our practice field for a century now, where we warmed up for the real coups. Ike and the Dulles brothers used to knock off Iranian and Central American regimes over slices of morning cantaloupe. Just eight years ago, the entire hemisphere save one pesky island was America’s to squeeze, and squeeze we did, while they begged for IMF handouts that only pulled them deeper into serfdom on our manor. Then Bush came to power and launched the most inept coup in American history against Chavez. And now all of Latin America has turned into a bunch of Castro-loving fags, welching on our IMF loans, and even inviting Ahmadinejad over for siestas and nationalization ceremonies. The title of a recent McClatchy article says it all: “Farewell to the Monroe Doctrine?” They might as well drop the question mark and fess up. There went the neighborhood a long time ago.Jimmy Carter Factor:
    
12. Addiction Memoirs. No literary genre is more degraded and mawkish than the rehab memoir. No surprise then that no genre is more popular in today’s American than the rehab memoir. It’s a very reactionary, unimaginative genre in the contemporary American version, focusing on the big three crosses: drugs, drink and divorce. The only thing more idiotic than these rehab memoirs are the gullible idiots who buy them, as witnessed by the con jobs that half-assed hucksters like “JT LeRoy” and James Frey pulled off. Why are these books so popular? Simple: everyone wants to be a victim these days. Especially white middle-class urbanites. By becoming a drunk or an addict, you can become a temporary victim. If you’ve got a “sexual abuse” tale to throw in, then you’ve hit the victim jackpot—which is why all these rehab memoirs have to have a sex abuse episode. If you’re really clever, you can use your connections to get the thing published. If you don’t have connections but you want to sob with someone who supposedly understands your pain, then curl up with an Augusten Burroughs or David Sheff or some other wealthy well-connected pig, and let the sobbing flow.Jimmy Carters Factor:
    

13. Ellen! Look, ladies! It’s wacky, upbeat, afternoon Ellen, the human Wellbutrin XL. There she is on the counter-mounted kitchen tv, dressed in Florida hospice colors, pushing her audience to applaud for musicians—not because of their music, but because they have cancer! And there she is making Barack Obama dance to James Brown on national tv—twice! And Ellen’s dancing too! She’s so wacky and happy! And cancer-free! Unlike her guests, speaking of whom, give them another round! … Ellen Degeneres sucked as a second-rate comedian doing routines about “What If God Was a Woman?” Now she’s reinvented herself as a third-rate Oprah, a human plague on the body televique, with no cure in sight.

    Patty Hearst Factor:

    

14. Benizir Bhutto-philia. She wasn’t Musharraf; she was a chic-dressed, porcelain-complexioned go-getter woman in a land teeming with wife-stoning darkies, and she spoke pro-American gibberish with an aristocratic Brit accent. She went to Oxford, and so does her son. To contemporary America, this means she must be Ghandi with tits, Mandela in a salwar kameez. So we encouraged her to return to take back Pakistan and rid it of all the dark-skinned non-English-speaking terrorists. We told her that we had back-side covered, and sent her off to Karachi where she got murdered faster than you can say “Mission Accomplished.” Bad for American geopolitics (but could they get worse?); however, great for Bhutto’s Gandhi-creds, creating a mini-Diana media boomlet that sent Bhutto’s quickie autobiography into the bestseller charts. It took a cool and collected Brit, William Dalrymple, to disturb the cocktail party with a Times op-ed that reminded mourners of Benizir’s very un-Gandhi-like death squads, her longtime role as Pakistan’s Jihadi paymaster, and her crushing of any opposition to her rule.

    Angelina Jolie Factor: Four adopted dark kids. Jolie’s a shoe-in to play Bhutto in the upcoming biopic. While filming, Jolie will also adopt a Pakistani orphan, and name him “Benizira.”

    

15. CNN is “liberal.” American news has become so shamelessly propagandistic and idiotic that today, a blatant White House propaganda tool like CNN is considered “liberal” simply because it’s gotten a wee bit squeamish over the whole Iraq debacle, as compared to FOX, which, like the gang in Hitler’s bunker, is still issuing cheerful dispatches about inevitable victory in Iraq. Then there’s Lou Dobbs, the guy with the freakish child molester face who transformed himself from neoliberal “New Economy” tool into a sleazy Mexican-bashing rat. This is what passes for a “liberal media” in the United Embarrassment of America.

    Susan Sarandon’s Breasts Factor: We suckle the anti-American milk out of 3 of Sarandon’s breasts as an antidote to CNN’s toxins.

    

16. Low-ball American Corruption. In Russia, if you want to buy a vote, you’ve got to pay a Duma politician about a million bucks. In America, if you want a Congressman to legislate a $5 billion tax break for your company, all you have to do is fly him to a golf course in some damp shithole like Scotland, and those $5 billion tax payer dollars are yours.

    Shame Factor:

    

17. Trendy pseudo-hyper-self-consciousness. How many times have you heard an American use this preface: “I know it’s a cliche to say this. And I know it’s a cliche to say that it’s a cliche to say this… but [ENTER CLICHE HERE].” Translated: “I know I am a waste of this planet’s limited oxygen supply, but I’m going to suck in a few more lungfulls of your precious air than usual in order to lull you into a false sense of hope before I expel a lethal cloud of hokey idiocies, flooring you once again.”

    Adam Gadhan Factor: There’s only one way to shut up a pseudo-self-conscious reference-dropping David Eggers type, and that’s to cut off their preface with a big loud “Allahu Akhbar!”

    

18. The Ongoing Insane Southwest Building Boom. Exactly how many more years of extended drought and water/electricity shortages do Americans need before they stop building in the doomed Southwest? 14? 27? Will it take total Civilizational collapse like the kind Jim Kunstler sees right around the corner from the latest Scottsville condo project? The Dust Bowl is the new normal; the Colorado River is shrinking. Already states are fighting each other in court for access to dwindling water supplies, mirroring intra-state conflicts between agriculture and the cities. But still they keep building air-conditioned houses with lawns, even though the grids are already snapping during 110+ degree nights, killing all the old people who keep retiring there like it’s 1966. The slow death of golf won’t come soon enough to save the desert states. Vegas will make one hell of a ruin.

    Shame Factor: A plague of knit-capped hippies on all of you swine!

    

19. World’s Largest Prison Population. The dollar may be crashing below even joke currencies like the Kazakh tenge, but when it comes to jailing our poor, we’re still #1 with a bullet. More than two and a quarter million Americans—one out of every 100—are doing some form of time. Yup, when it comes to putting our citizens in prison, we kick the authoritarian crap out of repression stars like Russia and China. The U.S. also is riding high in the state-murder competition saddle, lagging only behind Pakistan, Sudan, China, and a few other beacons of liberty in the capital punishment competition. But hey, it’s working! Americans don’t kill each other in Wendy’s restaurants or college campuses anymore, no siree! Welcome to the United States of Visiting Hours. Please keep your hands away from the plexiglass.

    

20. Third World-like Political Nepotism. Bullshit countries with bullshit currencies elect wives and sons to run their countries simply because the population hasn’t developed beyond medieval monarchy thinking. The Philippines elected the widowed wife of a slain democracy leader. Argentina elected the wife of a former president (and hailed the wife of a former dictator). America came late to the “we’re medieval-brained morons and we’re proud of it!” parade, starting in 2000, when America annointed the recessive-gene-damaged son of a failed one-term president into the White House. It was so great that he was reelected, while in Congress, at least 18 senators, dozens of House members and several administration officials were family legacies, leading the Washington Post to declare that the US government “resembles the court of Louis XIV without the powdered wigs.” This year, Americans are working on electing the wife of the president before the recessive-gene son. She may fail, but Americans are a hard-working lot, so don’t be surprised if by 2020 America finally catches up to the Philippines and Argentina and other third-world shitholes by electing the first ex-leader’s wife to lead them

    Michelle Obama Factor: Three and a half. Fox and CNN should be forced to loop 2 weeks straight of Michelle Obama’s “for the first time in my life I was proud to be an American” speech into every American’s living room.

    

    BONUS
    EMBARRASSMENTS!

21. William Kristol. We’re not sure what we’re most ashamed of: the systemic nepotism responsible for the retardocon’s success; the major newspaper that recently hired him in the alleged spirit of “balance”; or the small amount of pleasure we derive from reading his atrocious prose and lame-ass attempts at “high” cultured diction to Manhattan-up his hard-hitting conservatism? Kristol’s last Times column saw him take a break from massaging John McCain’s nipples to gently stroke the fresh corpse of William F. Buckley. After plugging his prep school in the first line (Collegiate, 1970) Kristol falls back on the use of Latin phrases and Victorian poets to escape from his troubles with English and sound better educated than he is. How ashamed does it make us that moron like Kristol is taken seriously? Put it this way: he makes us appreciate the wit and genius of William Safire.

    Alan Berg Factor: Three shots ring out in the capitol’s cool dark night.

    

22. American women’s voices. The anchor-lady monotone all American women have spent the last 20 years perfecting, so that all American women, no matter what they’re saying, sound like they’re reading the 10 p.m. newscast at a Midwestern midsize TV station summing up the day’s stock market activity. Is there any other nation on earth infested with 150 million women who talk like transvestites with back hair?

    Shame Factor:

    

23. Paul Thomas Anderson.

    The other Anderson in the “Axis of Hackdom,” Paul 3-Names wowed the Beigeocracy by–get this–holding extra-long shots on his actors as they have internal moments. Yup, in a country gone totally stupid, all you gotta do is walk out of the edit room for 10 minutes, and suddenly Rolling Stone stands and cheers your “rule-busting experimentation” while Roger Ebert creams that PTA’s film is a, “A force beyond categories.” Of course, Ebert also raved about Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, “[Adam] Sandler, liberated from the constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. Watching this film, you can imagine him in Dennis Hopper roles. He has darkness, obsession and power.”

    Jimmy Carter Factor:

    

24. The War on Drugs. The shame here is mitigated only slightly by the fact that public support is finally crumbling for the Prohibition gravy train. But you can still see anti-pot ads on American television cut from the same hemp cloth as the original Reefer Madness campaign that made shitty Mexican weed the gateway to Negro jazz musicians bending America’s innocent daughters over a snare drum. The funny-sad thing is these ads are crammed between plugs for pharmaceutical drugs featuring animated butterflies and permanent sunsets on the beach. If the Office of National Drug Control Policy had a gram for every lie it ever told to justify WoD budgets, they’d make the Medellin cartel look like the BookMobile.

    Shame Factor:

    

25. America’s “Post-Racist” Delusion. Barak Obama may have a lot of detractors both among Republicans and Democrats, but if there’s one thing all Americans can agree on, it’s that Obama’s rise to political stardom means that Americans are no longer racist. Yeah, right, and Uzbek jet pilots might fly out of our butts. When one of America’s most painful issues, its racist history, is allegedly solved because white people vote for a moderate-conservative Wall Street black guy with male-magazine looks and a CNN voice which utters words carefully steering away from anything about the whole race issue that might upset people–in other words, every white American’s Dream Negro–then all we can say is, like the midget lady in Poltergeist, “This house is clean.” CUT TO: thunder, lightening, and suddenly the earth shakes as hundreds of millions of ghosts rise from the Red States, shocking pollsters, who were sure Obama was going to win!

    Howard Zinn Factor:

    

This article was first published in The eXile on March 6, 2008.

Buy the book: The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the record of The eXile’s early beginnings. It’s The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove), first published in 2000. Click the cover to order it through amazon, or order buy it from your favorite overpriced neighborhood bookseller.

Don’t be fooled by how amusing this image looks.

You ever sit through the rough cut of your friend’s independent film? Well, I have, lotsa times, God help me, so seeing Oliver Stone’s W. really brought back some nauseating memories. It seems to run about eight hours and is so boring, so fatheaded, and so full of lame attempts at profundity that it’s just like the rough cut of almost every terrible independent film ever made. You can practically feel the director sitting behind you while it unspools, breathing on the back of your neck and willing you to see the brilliance of his vision.

For reasons that elude me, the majority of major film critics are playing along with the director on this one, at least to the point of expressing their criticisms very, very gently. This makes me wonder if most of them were actually with Oliver Stone, at some point, in a seedy rented screening room where rough cuts are so often shown. Perhaps they felt the obligations of friendship that weigh so heavily after the screening, when the fatheaded pal asks, “So whadja think?”

One of the few critics who’s apparently not a coercible friend of Oliver Stone’s is Anne Hornaday of the Washingon Post who lets loose with this insightful heart’s-cry:

Why this movie — a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature — and why now? Why, when Americans and citizens around the globe are still coming to terms with the implications of so many Bush policies, would they want to pay money at the box office to see what amounts to an extended “Saturday Night Live” skit?

Why, when so many people are familiar with the vignettes that drive the episodic narrative of “W.” — the Time Bush Choked on a Pretzel, the Time Bush Quit Drinking After a Brutal Hangover, the Time Bush Invaded Iraq — would they want to see it all reenacted again, albeit through Stone’s occasionally stingingly satirical lens?

As Bush himself might say, the answers to those questions are between you and your God.

The only problem I see with Hornaday’s take is that she makes the movie sound too good. Calling Stone’s lens “occasionally stingingly satirical” is giving that lens way too much credit, and the strain of praising Stone is probably what caused her to overdo the adjectives and muck up her sentence so badly. Even comparing W. to an extended Saturday Night Live skit is way too generous: some of those skits are pretty funny for a minute or two, anyway, and now is exactly the dire time when we all want to watch those skits. But at least Hornaday’s observation gets us closer the experience of the film itself.

W. really is a bunch of often-terrible skits spun together and splatted out onto the screen as if fired from a salad-shooter. The skits are all played in different tones, all of them going on way too long, and all of them hinging on the fascination of watching good actors impersonate George W. Bush and his circle of grotesques. There’s Josh Brolin playing W. as a rube failing upwards into the White House, featuring great work on Brolin’s part. But unfortunately Stone keeps undercutting the fantastic all-out black comedy he could’ve made out of that performance, instead sticking poor Brolin into the dumbest Oedipal melodrama I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s Richard Dreyfuss’ Dick Cheney—far too warm and personable, nothing like the Central Casting evil capitalist fatcat we’ve marveled at all these years. Thandie Newton’s Condoleeza Rice doesn’t get a lot of screen time, which probably helped her achieve this wonderfully vicious rip into Condi, a real skit masterpiece—get her over to SNL right away! And so on through Jeffrey Wright’s tortured Collin Powell, Scott Glenn’s checked-out Rumsefeld, Elizabeth Banks’ nice-gal Laura Bush, James Cromwell’s indignant WASP Poppy…zzz…zzz…

Where was I? Oh yeah, how much this movie absolutely reeked. I only went to W. because the ads looked surprisingly good. I’d sworn off all Oliver Stone movies after Nixon. (God, what a stupid movie. Stone had Anthony Hopkins playing Nixon as such a hunched, deformed, creepy Quasimodo character he could never have gotten elected for anything but medieval bell-ringer at Notre Dame.) But this one looked different; the comedy seemed to be on purpose. There was Brolin doing this hilarious skewering of Bush, and I thought, jeez, maybe Oliver Stone has finally given up blowhard bathos and is playing to his strengths, turning his gift for the grotesque toward humor, where it belongs. But don’t be fooled; the ads represent only the dedication of the film’s PR team in searching through tons of idiotic footage and pulling out the few good bits for the preview. As is so often the case with movies lately, the marketers are smarter than the filmmakers.

If you decide to go see W., just be warned that, once again, Oliver Stone thinks he has some sort of profound insight to share with you. In this case, it’s W.’s daddy issues. Stone thinks it’s so interesting that W. spent his whole life trying to measure up to his father H.’s high standards that he’s staged approximately 57 scenes of father-son confrontation. It’s typical of Stone that he doesn’t seem to recognize the utter silliness of these 57 scenes. He plays them straight. Clearly, to Stone, it’s serious when W. finally makes good, and Poppy gives him a family heirloom—the Talismanic Cufflinks of Grandpa Preston, founder of the Bush fortune. And it’s serious when W. is crushed by this paternal gesture, because Poppy only gives him a loving note along with the cufflinks, instead of, I don’t know, kissing him full on the lips and saying “You complete me.”

Stone doesn’t seem to understand that some people have real problems. Some people with daddy issues have daddies they’ve never met, say, or daddies who used to beat them daily just to keep their whipping arm limber. But Stone’s heart really seems to bleed for poor W., whose daddy merely gave him a chunk of the family fortune, all the contacts he could ever use, fifty chances to succeed in the professions of his choice, the family cufflinks, and several very affectionate notes. What a neurotic, withholding bastard that H. was and is!

Anyway, that’s the coherent part of the narrative. The rest is pure salad-shooter. I’ll warn you of just three other things before you make up your mind to go or not:

1. At the Texas barbeque where W. meets Laura, there’s a giant close-up of a corn-cob on the ground that gets stepped on. You’re watching the scene, waiting for the tiresomely inevitable hook-up, when suddenly there’s a massive corn-on-the-cob-in-the-grass shot featuring a lovingly-detailed foot crunching over it. In its perverse weirdness it’s worthy of Salvador Dali, but heaven knows what the hell it’s doing there. Right after that W. and Laura are face-to-face and the rest, to our sorrow, is history. Anyone out there familiar with corncob symbology? Is it just your basic phallic terror as W.’s about to get his own corncob crunched, or is corn the State Vegetable of Texas, or what?

2. There’s a crazy-cam effect you have to watch out for that keeps popping up in the film. It’s when the outer circumference of the image all goes blurry; it looks sort of like in old movies when they were trying to establish the subjective experience of a nutcase having a hallucination. Sometimes there’d be a swirly pattern over everything, but blurry edges were popular too. In W. the effect doesn’t relate to anything concrete like drunkenness. It just pops up now and then for the hell of it.

3. Somewhere into the film you’ll experience Mid-point Panic, when you realize that Stone & Co. are determined to plod through huge swatches of W’s life story, shuttling backward and forward between the Iraq War “present” and everything that happens in the past leading up to it, from Yale fraternity hazing on up. Mid-point Panic will occur at different times for different viewers: it seized me just as W. announced he intended to run for governor, and I suddenly thought, wait, we’ve been sitting here for three hours at least and he isn’t even governor yet? O merciful God, will I ever see the light of day again?

Other critics were apparently untroubled by the film’s unendurable running time. (129 minutes is what they advertise, but don’t you believe it. Take the running time for Gone With the Wind and triple it. By the time you get out of the theater the election will already be over.) Here’s the strangely zen Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times displaying his imperturbable bad-film-viewing abilities:

…W. is not a dispassionate biography; it is an interpretation of personality intersecting with history, and as a piece of drama it is persuasive and perfectly creditable. Its vision of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, of a creature of terrible earnestness overmatched by the situation he’s in, certainly gives Americans something to think about.

I’m not sure what Kenneth Turan is on when he watches movies like W., (Ketamine? Dopamine? Dramamine?) but whatever it is, I want some.