AUTOPSY ON THE VP DEBATE

     Last night in an obscure Virginia hamlet, the two equally obscure Vice-Presidential candidates spent the evening in their only debate. Mike Pence---best remembered for caving in on Indiana's stand against homosexual 'marriage'---represented Trump. Tim Kaine, representing Clinton, mostly interrupted and distracted during the debate and repeated the Clinton talking-points.

        The debate was hosted by Elaine Quijano, who is paid $2.5 million by CBS. CBS, along with Viacom and BET, are owned by National Amusements, Inc. the corporate arm of Wall Street mogul Sumner Redstone. National Amusements in 2016 has donated $367,000 to the Clinton Campaign and has spent nearly $7.5 million on its lobbying firms. The company employs 34 lobbyists in the Beltway, 30 of whom previously held positions in the federal government. We can deduce from this about how slanted the questions would be.

         So, about an hour into the debate Ms. Elaine obediently played the Russia-bashing card. She asked the following question: "Currently the city of Aleppo, Syria is under siege. Russian and Syrian forces have been dropping cluster-bombs and incendiaries on civilian populations. Nearly 400,000 have died in Syria. Does the US have an obligation to intervene in a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude?"

         Neither candidate challenged the overt media lies presented here, but tried to outdo one another on their hawkishness and which hated Russia worse. The question is a standard talking-point of the US Corporate Media which has no basis in fact to begin with. Aleppo is not being starved out (about 2/3 of the city has been liberated by the Allies); the Allies are not employing these types of weapons on either civilians or combatants; and the casualty figures quoted are skewed by including military casualties on both sides.

        The source of these talking-points on Syria---which are never questioned by the Corporate Media---is a London-based CIA cutout called The Syrian Observatory on Human Rights. The director of SOHR is a Syrian expat with a long criminal history in his native land. He has known connections to Al-Nusra (aka Al-Qaeda) which provides SOHR with most of their source material.

        If anyone believed that Trump's policy toward Russia would be anything different than Obama/Clinton's, Pence quickly dispelled such illusions. Calling President Putin a 'little man' 'a bully' and 'a thug', Pence even went so far as to accuse Obama of being to lenient with Russia!

          "Obama and Clinton promoted a 'reset' with Russia and look what happened."  Pence complained. "Their weakness allowed Russia to seize Crimea, Ukraine and they are building a missile base in Syria."

            Well, as we know, both Russia and China have remilitarized and begun acting geopolitically---not in response to US weakness, but to continued US treachery. Pence complained about Russia's activities in Ukraine; though not mentioning Obama's intrigues led to the Maidan Uprising. Pence had nothing to say about Obama's duplicity in Libya when he and Putin agreed not to intervene there militarily. When Russia's ally, Qaddafi started winning, Obama ordered NATO airstrikes.

           Obama met with Putin at the start of the Syrian Civil War and agreed not to intervene in Syria if Russia would guarantee Syrian chemical weapons were removed. Russia complied, and Obama ordered airstrikes on Syria. The first Syrian ceasefire ended with US-backed rebels regrouping in Turkey and invading Western Syria. The day after the second ceasefire, US warplanes attacked a Syrian Army position.

          Pence also complained about Russia's military hegemony overseas: in spite of the fact that Russia has 7 foreign bases compared to America's 800. Kaine proved himself an even bigger ignoramus than Pence, referring repeatedly to Putin as a 'dictator.' Either way, it appears that the Neocons' hopes of continuing the Cold War will survive the Obama Administration. 

          Aside from that, the debate was unremarkable. The uptight Kaine was continually interrupting, over-talking Pence and trying to divert the discussion to even more irrelevant subjects than those brought up by the hostess. Pence, even by Corporate Media admission 'won' the debate; though neither he nor Kaine actually outlined any specifics. The general consensus among the Corporate Media was that the VP debate wouldn't change the voting demographics much. It appears that little will change after the election either.