Hello Jim, it’s your mother here. I didn’t want to write this. And I apologize for sending this to The eXiled, but I didn’t know how else to reach you. Jimmy, please listen to me just this one time. Stop embarrassing yourself. Please, I beg you. Why, a mother asks, did you write a groveling letter to Mark Ames that began, “Unlike Matt Taibbi, you’re a good writer”? Jimmy, you’re more confused today at age 50 than when I used to smack you around at age 5. You’re a talentless meathead and a failed Broadway actor with a chip on your shoulder, and it hurts me to see you flaunt it. You’re too vain, and too thick in the skull, to recognize what a complete ass you’re making of yourself today. Jimmy, you’re 50 years old. The 1990s are over. In 5 years you’ll qualify for senior citizens’ discounts. Please, Jimmy, please stop it. Stop being a masochist and hurting yourself. You aren’t a redneck. You aren’t scaring anyone. You aren’t impressing anyone. Mr. Ames seems like a nice Jewish fellow, why do you have to bother him, the way you pestered me and your father? Of course we hit you. You wouldn’t stop whining all the time. You wrote all about it in your “Rape” magazine. Clearly, I should have beaten you a lot more, Jimmy. I failed to prevent you from becoming a 50-year-old monkey, and for that I am sorry.

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Exiled editor Mark Ames was back on the Dylan Ratigan Show today ranting about the great American inflation scam, and how companies skim the junk food that goes into your mouth, and skim the toilet paper that wipes the digested Hebrew National hot dogs on their way out.

That’s right, they even rip you off while you’re sitting on the toilet with your pants down, folks! Corporate America, have you no shame, sirs!

Ahem…Here’s the video of today’s rant:

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Mark Ames went on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show yesterday to remind America about the real Ronald Reagan no one else will talk about on TV. If you’ve been suffering from nausea and stomach gas over the past week during the Ronald Reagan 100th birthday celebrations, overdosing on our Soviet-like “Glorification of Dear Eternal Leader of All Times Ronald Reagan” then take a dose of this Ames antidote and call us in the morning.

Here’s the video: (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on June 10, 2004

“One thing’s for sure. Pessimism never created a job.”

— From Bush’s new anti-Kerry television ad

For my first two months out here, watching the Republican goon-machine retreat into the shadows in shame as their paradigm crumbled around them provided an excellent source of entertainment. But over the past week, the madness has come full circle. The shock of imperial decay has been too much to bear — and so a strange moratorium has been imposed upon all current events in America.

It started at the end of May, with the longest and most gratuitous celebration of D-Day imaginable. The D-Day celebrations on cable news networks ran every single day for over a week, taking up nearly every minute of every news program. Nothing but long, weepy elegies to the Greatest Generation, a lone trumpet wistfully soundtracking to shots of the flag and steely, wrinkled veterans. (more…)

This article was first published in Vice.

If President Obama’s SOTU address left you feeling vaguely suicidal but you’re not sure why, a quick comparison to the previous Great Depression president’s SOTU address might clear it up and help you to your logical conclusion. Here is an excerpt from FDR’s 1935 State of the Union speech:

Let us for a moment strip from our simple purpose the confusion that results from a multiplicity of detail and from millions of written and spoken words.

We find our population suffering from old inequalities, little changed by past sporadic remedies. In spite of our efforts and in spite of our talk we have not weeded out the overpriviledged and we have not effectively lifted up the underpriviledged. Both of these manifestations of injustice have retarded happiness. No wise man has any intention of destroying what is known as the “profit motive”, because by the profit motive we mean the right by work to earn a decent livelihood for ourselves and our families. (more…)

This article was first published in Alternet.

Now that the shock of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting is starting to wear off and the country is returning to its normal insanity again, we’re back to facing a far worse, far more serious, and far more violent threat than mere rampage shootings:  “Austerity.”

The DC-Wall Street power circuit has already decided for the rest of us that “Austerity” is the Big Word that will define the 2011 political agenda. Austerity is what the oligarch-sponsored Tea Party demanded, what the Republicans are promising to deliver now that they’re in control of drafting the budget, and what the Obama Administration is going to try to enact as part of their neo-Clinton triangulation strategy. They’re backed by the Establishment media, which has been hammering home the same message for months now: Austerity is the answer to our problems—problems that were created by the same Establishment that wants to make us scream in pain again, but that’s beside the point here. The way this “austerity” debate has been framed in all the major media outlets, anyone pushing for austerity cuts and “pain” is automatically labeled “courageous”—which is an odd way of defining courage, since not a single rich politician or pundit pushing for “austerity” will actually suffer that pain, and most will profit from it. But that’s what counts as “courage” in our era. These same media elites used words like “courage” and “bold” to describe how Vietnam War deserters sent other people’s kids to die in Iraq—it was “courageous” because these warmongering draft-dodgers didn’t pander to the protesters in the streets or popular opinion. (Of course by this standard, that would make the world’s worst, most undemocratic tyrants the most courageous leaders in the world.) (more…)

This article was first published in Vanity Fair.

It takes a lot to terrorize a Russian. Compared to the truly spectacular acts of terrorism and violence that Russians have suffered over the past two decades, today’s suicide bombing at Moscow’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, is too small-time to have much of an effect besides pissing off an already-pissed-off population.

Back in 2004, two passenger jets that took off from this same airport were blown out of the sky by Chechen “black widows”—Chechen women widowed by the brutal war with Russia, and turned into suicide bombers. Shortly after that double-Lockerbie airplane bombing, opposition leader Eduard Limonov explained to me what he thought was behind the logic: “They understood that Russians wouldn’t be moved if only one plane was blown up, so they blew up two planes simultaneously, just to get our attention,” he said. Limonov used to write about Russian hard-heartedness, the result of their brutal experience with Communism, followed by the nihilistic Yeltsin Era, when the average male’s life expectancy plunged from 68 years to just 56, in a free-market Babylon of corruption, plunder, and violence.

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