Bin Laden is a murderous, pompous rich boy with a third-rate mind — which, of course, made him excellent front-man fodder first for the CIA and then for the extremists created by the torture factories of American-backed tyrannies. (Those personal qualities would have also made bin Laden an excellent candidate for President of the United States, as we saw in his Texas doppelganger's races in 2000 and 2004.) There seems little point in continually denouncing the self-evident malignity of this wretch and his cronies — who have been inflated into world-historical figures by the desperate need of the American militarists to justify their own world-encircling agenda of loot and domination.

Similarly, it seems a bit redundant to point out that John McCain is an obviously crazed and dazed third-rater who is quite willing to walk over endless mounds of the innocent dead in order to grasp — for the briefest time, at the faltering, burnt-out end of his life — the filthy rag of power.

Democratic presidents took us into two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam. A Democratic Senate authorized the war on Iraq. Jackson and Van Buren were ethnic cleansers. Polk lied us into a war of aggression against Mexico. Wilson invaded Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and stripped away rights at home with Bushlike abandon after dragging us into World War I. Franklin Roosevelt put Japanese Americans in prison camps during his world war. Truman is the only person ever to have ordered the use of nuclear bombs, after which he started a war in Korea.

Kennedy began the slaughter in Vietnam, narrowly avoided rushing the world into nuclear holocaust, and backed the use of death squads in South and Central America. Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnamese killing. Carter funded and armed murderers in El Salvador, supported and armed the Indonesian military as it slaughtered the East Timorese, backed a military regime in South Korea that slaughtered thousands, and recruited reactionary Muslims to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Clinton killed the Branch Davidians in Waco, with blowback in Oklahoma City, which was followed by PATRIOT Act precursor the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Clinton sold arms to all sorts of murderous nations other than the obligatory Israel, including Colombia, while routinely bombing Iraq — including civilian neighborhoods, even while imposing sanctions that killed a half million to a million Iraqis, not to mention bombing Yugoslavian civilians with cluster bombs in supposed response to killing that actually largely took place in response to the bombing, killing that was surpassed during the same period by that perpetrated by the Turkish government using weapons Clinton sold them. And then there was Somalia.

When the media erased Dennis Kucinich from the 2004 presidential race and promoted Howard Dean as a peace candidate, many believed that Dean wanted peace, even as he reassured the war powers that be in every interview that he wanted no such thing. John Kerry tried the same trick much less skillfully. In 2006 we elected Democratic majorities in Congress thinking that they would end the occupation of Iraq; and instead they escalated it - all the while advertising themselves as the best means to end the occupation after 2008. Senator Barack Obama refuses to commit to ending the occupation of Iraq or even to not launching new wars of aggression, and yet he is almost universally seen as an antiwar candidate.

Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other US torture facilities. Thousands remain "disappeared," possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.

Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America's latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional.