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For all intents and purposes, Nikki Haley or Lindsey Graham could be U.S. House Speaker, and we wouldn’t know the difference. Michael Johnson has quickly morphed into another two-bit warmonger and big-government, police-state shill like virtually every House Speaker before him—at least in modern memory.
Before taking the Speaker’s chair, Johnson had a reputation of being a pro-peace, fiscal conservative who wanted to secure America’s borders and stop the out-of-control deficit spending in Washington. That Michael Johnson is no more! The new Michael Johnson is a measly, cowardly, pathetic little weasel whose backbone is made from jelly.
First, see how Johnson betrayed his oath to the Constitution by being the deciding vote in passing the FISA bill with Section 702 intact. This is the Let-The-Government-Spy-On-You- And-Illegally-Raid-Your-Home-Without-A-Warrant bill. And again, Johnson cast the deciding vote to pass it. In so doing, Johnson joined the Deep State coalition that includes traitors such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.
From Paul Craig Roberts:
Republican Speaker of the House Flushes US Constitution Down the Toilet
As I predicted on April 11, the police state got the Republicans to reconsider and to pass their warrantless spying and home entry. The Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson cast the deciding vote that nixed the warrant requirement.
This tells us all we need to know about Republicans. They are part of the problem.
https://greenwald.locals.com/post/5519441/mike-johnson-enables-warrantless-spying-on-americans-war-between-israel-us-and-iran-plus-lee-fang
Edward Snowden reports that the situation is even more serious than I thought. A section of the FISA Act is being enlarged to require every company and person that provides any internet-related service to assist NSA surveillance.
“This bill represents one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”
Secondly, Mike Shedlock perfectly pegs Mike Johnson’s passage of a 95 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine and Israel.
Mike Johnson Goes Full Neocon, Nikki Haley May as Well Be House Speaker
In a speech that Nikki Haley would endorse 100 percent, Speaker Mike Johnson begs the House to approve more aid to Ukraine and Israel to the tune of $95 billion total.
The Wall Street Journal reports Mike Johnson Opposed Ukraine Aid. Then He Risked His Job for It.
“I really do believe the intel and in the briefings that we’ve gotten,” Johnson said. “I believe Xi [Jinping] and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil,” warning that Russia could march west across Europe if not stopped now. “To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys.”
That is a false dichotomy.
One does not have to make a choice between sending bullets or men to Ukraine. One could easily do neither or both.
Sending bullets does not preclude further stupidity such as sending troops.
Dave Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director, blasted Mike Johnson for his speech.
This is why Speaker Johnson must go. His statement is laced with neocon paranoia, stupidity, lies and hollow excuses for warmongering. Putin has no interest in molesting the Poles, to say nothing of storming the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. And Russia has a GDP of $2.2 trillion versus NATO’s $45 trillion.
China’s $50 trillion debt-ridden Ponzi would collapse in months if its $3.5 trillion flow of export earnings were disrupted by an attempting landing by its single modern aircraft carrier on the California coast. And Iran has no nukes, no intercontinental range missiles and a GDP equal to 130 hours of US annual output.
Some Axis of evil!
When House Republicans booted Kevin McCarthy for Mike Johnson, I confidently predicted Johnson would be no better and might prove to be much worse.
The results are now in. Johnson is proven much worse. To get deals, Johnson has even agreed to expand Child Tax Credits.
Not even Nikki Haley would have done that.
The majority of Republicans voted against the $95 billion aid package, which means Johnson sided with Democrats to pass the bill.
And as far as Israel being the poor innocent victim and Iran being the big, bad aggressive wolf, Tim Brown provides us with much needed perspective:
Robert Inlakeshl reminds readers of how Israel has behaved in the past.
Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel was framed in the West as a reckless attempt to spark a major regional war, but in reality, Israel has been attacking Iran for decades.
As is routinely the case with Western-backed wars, the corporate media’s timeline begins at the moment that suits their narrative. We have seen this play out recently, with the attempt to rob the Gaza war of all contexts before October 7, 2023. Similarly, when it comes to Israel’s conflict with Iran, the two have been embroiled in what is referred to as a “shadow war,” the details of which are pretty shocking.
While the international media’s attention was riveted on Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel, drawing great focus to some 300 drones and missiles used in the attack, no major deal was made of Israel’s strike on April 1 against the consular segment of Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Syria, that killed a dozen people, including seven Iranian officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In this unprecedented act of aggression against Iranian soil, breaking international diplomatic norms, the Israelis were shielded by the U.S. government at the United Nations Security Council, blocking any condemnation of this act.
Despite an admission from British Foreign Secretary David Cameron that had the UK embassy been attacked similarly, they too would retaliate, the double-standard argument that Iran shouldn’t respond continues to dominate the airways.
However, the Israel-Iran “Shadow War” did not begin with recent events. Israel has been carrying out brutal assassinations of civilian scientists on Iranian soil since 2010 while also carrying out acts of espionage that have endangered innocent civilians in the country.
As early as in the years 2010, 2011 and 2012, Israeli Mossad agents have been planting viruses designed to cause malfunctions in Iranian oil and nuclear power facilities. Another kind of provocative action occurred in 2018, when it was reported that an Israeli Mossad team had raided an archive facility in Tehran, stealing documents that pertained to its nuclear power program.
In 2020, the New York Times and Washington Post reported that Israel planted bombs inside Iran’s Natanz Nuclear facility, which almost caused an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Later that year, the Israeli Mossad assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in Tehran. Then, in April of 2021, another explosion occurred at the Natanz facility, which the New York Times reported was Israel’s doing.
The Israelis have also trained members of the MEK terrorist group to carry out attacks on civilian targets inside Iran. The list of Mossad-linked cells that have been arrested by the Iranian authorities or carried out acts of espionage and sabotage is simply too numerous to cover at length. Early last year, U.S. officials even told Reuters that a suicide drone attack targeting a factory in the city of Isfahan was an Israeli attack.
More recently, in late December, Israel launched airstrikes on Damascus and assassinated IRGC official Seyed Razi Mousavi. And in January, Israel launched airstrikes in Damascus, murdering five Iranian military personnel members and Syrian citizens. Then, in early February, Israel was accused of blowing up gas pipelines in Iran.
None of these actions, which would likely elicit a response by most nations, provoked Iran to launch a direct strike on Israel.
In addition to all of this, Israel has been the world’s top cheerleader for the West’s crushing sanctions that have significantly impacted Iran’s civilian population, specifically access to lifesaving medical supplies. AIPAC, the powerful Israeli Lobby group in the United States, worked hard to prevent the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal from passing, then pushed for the Trump administration to unilaterally withdraw before pressuring the Biden administration to refrain from reviving the deal despite this being a campaign promise. Israel even played a role in the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s top general tasked with battling ISIS, Qassem Soleimani.
Yet, despite Israel’s long history of documented attacks against Iran and around 30 years of false predictions as to when Iran is supposedly going to develop a nuclear weapon, which is the premise for Western sanctions, the corporate media is still trying to sell the public on the lie that Israel is an innocent victim and that there was no justifiable reason for Iran to retaliate.
And before closing this column, Newsweek had an interesting analysis of why Johnson became the overnight neocon war hawk that he is now. One paragraph in this report I found extremely enlightening:
The speaker has also been meeting with Ukrainians in Washington D.C. Conversations with evangelicals in particular "moved" the speaker—who is deeply religious—according to Melinda Haring of the Atlantic Council think tank. [Emphasis added]
Noted in the report was one prominent Ukrainian evangelical, but what was not reported in the Newsweek article was that notable “Christian” war hawk and Zionist extremist Pastor John Hagee also made the rounds on Capitol Hill to lobby for more aid money for the wars in Ukraine and Israel—especially Israel.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Johnson was also heavily influenced by Hagee.
Of course, Hagee represents the very worst of all things Christian Zionism. But being an outspoken evangelical himself, it is almost certain that Johnson shares Hagee’s Christian Zionist convictions.
These Christian Zionist preachers and politicians are pushing the world into World War III over their flagrantly false prophecy doctrines. Include Michael Johnson in that list.
By the way, I invite all my readers to watch this brief 4-minute video I produced last Sunday entitled Questions For Mr. Christian Zionist, John Hagee. I really hope you’ll watch it and share it with everyone you can. Someone in the pulpit had to call out Hagee for his wretched, blasphemous false prophecy teachings; and that’s what I did last Sunday.
Here is the YouTube link to my 4-minute video.
Once again, the American people have been betrayed and the U.S. Constitution has been trashed by a professing conservative Republican—and a professed Christian conservative at that. But then again, conservative Christians have been selling out our liberties for decades. And they will keep selling us out as long as they keep believing in the devilish false doctrines of Christian Zionism.
© Chuck Baldwin
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