Actors and other Useful Idiots for Empire

by Cindy Sheehan

In 2005 while I was roasting for peace under the hot Texas sun at Camp Casey in Crawford, Tx, Rob Reiner sent his wife Michelle and a crew there to film a commercial with me.
Before the end of 2005, a lot of the people/groups who supported our antiwar effort kicked us to the curb when they figured out we really were against war and not just against Bush’s wars.
The Reiners were among the ones that I discovered didn’t so much care about the wars, but cared more about getting Demo-quacks elected.
Soon after Camp Casey temporarily shut-down that summer, I was invited to the Reiner’s house to have a meeting. I was never the kind of person who got all twittery over so-called celebrities, but if the Reiners could help our cause, I was anxious to further our collaboration.
Rob Reiner and his team had already offered to do the paperwork and pay for getting Gold Star Families for Peace (my organization at the time) non-profit (501c3) status which we gratefully accepted.
Anyway, at the meeting (which included billionaire, Demo-quack funder, Steve Bing), after the niceties were over, both Steve and Rob got down to the real brass-tacks of the meeting.  They wanted me to throw my influence (which was then pretty considerable) behind the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Bing looked me in the eye, with a serious face and said, “Mrs. Clinton is our only hope.”
I gasped and averred how she had not only voted to support the very war that killed my son, but was the Bush regime’s Demo-quack cover for war propaganda. Then Steve said this with a straight-face and no sense of how hurtful this statement could be to a mother whose oldest child was killed for these lies, “Mrs. Clinton is really against the wars and she will come out against them when it is politically expedient for her to do so.” What?! People are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere) and how can mothers like me even understand a little about “political expediency” when our hearts are ripped out of our chests? Not just for one day, but for the rest of our lives.
The meeting didn’t end really well, but I thanked them for their help and still refused to support Clinton for anything. When I wrote an article a couple of months later about how the antiwar movement should NOT support Clinton that was posted at Huffington Post, the attack dog of the Reiners called my sister and told her that they were pulling all support from me and Gold Star Families for Peace. In fact, Dede and CODEPINK, L.A. were protesting at a fundraiser for Clinton when Rob and Michelle pulled up and gave them the middle-finger.
The above is recounted for background on why the motives and credibility of Reiner should be viewed with suspicion.
The Meathead goes full-Archie Bunker and Produces Tripe
Enter this week’s outrage from Rob Reiner: A video he made with Morgan Freeman as the “star,” which is a complete, unabashed, total piece of lying propaganda against Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Interestingly enough, this video was posted about the same time that 41 Demo-quack US senators voted to give the regime tens of billions of dollars more in Pentagon funding: almost 700 billion. This amount is three times more than China spends and TEN times more than Russia spends on defense.
Of course, Rob Reiner could use his considerable wealth and influence to talk about something real like election fraud, but, since the DNC and Clinton campaign stole the 2016 primaries from Bernie Sanders, that wouldn’t be productive for doing what is his life work, getting his only “hope,” in the Oval Office.
The tens of thousands of people in Libya murdered by Clinton and Obama matter not to Reiner; the ongoing slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan are not even in his remote consciousness. Rather, blaming Russia and Putin for the loss of one of the most (rightly) unpopular politicians in US history and fomenting for more war is what he wants to join with other neocons like David Frum and Max Boot, to do.
Besides the treacherous motivations behind this piece of rotting tripe, there is actually not one shred of proof that Russia had anything to do with Clinton’s loss. I know she and her lackeys would like to blame everything from Putin to bad weather, but putting out a video like this is like playing with nuclear winter.
Other neoliberal/neoconservative idiots say, “Russia hacked” like it’s accepted wisdom. “Russia hacked and in other news, water is wet.”
Reiner, Freeman, and their ilk are not only liars, but they are dangerous propagandists approaching the level of a Riefenstahl.
Reiner and other useful idiots for Empire have formed a group called, “Committee to Investigate Russia,” to, “help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.” Besides the fact that the USA has never been a democracy, and even if it were, elections here with one War Party under Wall Street have been compromised and invalid for decades, not just since his Grating Hope got creamed by a carnival huckster.
I challenge this “committee” to produce any hard evidence for their malignant horseshit.
 Unpacking the Horseshit: Clump by Clump
Face it, Morgan Freeman’s voice does have a nice, authoritative kind of benevolent principal tone to it, but in Reiner’s irresponsible piece of doggerel, he uses it to unashamedly promote fear-mongering.
We have been attacked
We are at war
That’s how we begin.
From what I have been able to glean, the powers that be in Russia are treating this like an infantile joke, which on the surface it is.
However, the video obviously was made to sink us back into the lowest depths of the McCarthy witch hunts and HUAC hysteria and as a Cold War Kid, “I don’t find this stuff amusing any more,” (Paul Simon, Graceland).
I don’t appreciate being dragged back into a time when I was abused into believing the the Soviet Union was the most evil entity on earth, and as I study about the Bolshevik Revolution (Slogan: Peace Bread Land) on this 100th anniversary, I resent these Hollywood elites’ participation in this skewed “history.”
But, of course, the US is “at war,” and the US has been at war for all but about two dozen years of its existence.
He (Putin) Uses Cyberwarfare to Attack Democracies
After going on with the video’s undocumented “Putin for Dummies,” (truly, one has to be a dummy to believe any of this) we “learn” how this “KGB” agent uses his trickster wiles to “attack democracies around the world.” We don’t know which democracies Russia has “attacked” because this is a commercial to sell the commodity of fear, not a fact-based narrative.
Hmmm….The CIA was formed to be a bad actor on the world stage and here is a list of the Democracies the US has attacked and overthrown just since World War II:

He (Putin) Convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media
Do I even have to go there? Reiner and Freeman and the other neocons and Useful Idiots for Empire are aware that all the worldwide “mainstream” media are owned by a handful of very powerful people and entities and if we don’t “distrust” our media, then we are the foolish ones.
It has been proven, just in the Iraq War that killed my son, that outlets like MSNBCia used paid Pentagon shills to sell that war to a seemingly gullible American population. The White House had a group to make up crap like, “Mushroom Clouds,” that Hillary Clinton participated in. Garbage in, garbage out.
Morgan then sits behind a desk in what looks to be a bomb shelter and calls on Donald Trump to use the resources of the USG to determine “how this happened.” As far as I can tell, it has not even been determined “if” it happened. Let’s not skip any steps here.
For 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example of what we can all aspire to
To me, this is the most dangerous and irresponsible lie of the entire video and I don’t know how a black man can even utter those words without vomiting, because they make be throw up a little in my own mouth.  Morgan Freeman is a sellout to the struggle for black emancipation and the struggle for people under the terrible yoke of US occupation and oppression around the world.
The USA was one of the the last “democracies” to (allegedly) abandon slavery, and it took the lives of almost 700,000, mostly poor working-class young men, to do it. I say “allegedly,” because if anyone thinks slavery has been abolished in the USA, I suggest you watch “13th,” a most enlightening Netflix documentary on how the 13th Amendment to the US constitution just transferred slavery to the prison systems.
Like I pointed out above, the founders of the US didn’t frame our government as a democracy and most of the founders owned black slaves that were stolen from their continent and forced to perform labor in this “shining example;” the “shining example” that also committed genocide on its native population and has worked overtime to overthrow many democracies—true democracies; not just the feeble representation of democracy propagated by this horseshit.
Paul Robeson was a black man who realized how oppressed his people were and how that oppression connected to the liberation and anti-colonial struggles around the world. He paid a price for his courage and integrity, saying, among other things “why should the Negroes fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you they will never fight against the Soviet Union, or the peoples’ democracies.”
More than Reiner, who is just a tool for the demented Clinton wing of the Demo-quack party, Freeman should be ashamed of himself. I am sure Malcolm X would define him as a “house negro” always looking out for the interests and well-being of the master and not the enslaved masses.
And we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy
This bold declaration of exceptionalist horseshit is posted over young American troops being sent to slaughter and I know my son didn’t die to “protect” this “great” nation or save democracy. Like every single troop sacrificed before and after him, he was a victim to capitalism and imperialism.
It can be, and has been argued rather convincingly that the United States have never waged a war to “save democracy,” and the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazi savagery in World War II, yet was the first to liberate the death camps.
Reiner, et al., are enemies of truth;
They are enemies of peace;
They are enemies of true democracy.
They should be exposed and shamed.
Watch the horseshit here, if you must.

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