One measure of how far off the cliff the Obama administration has taken America is the matter of militarism. Although the U.S. has long been the world’s most prolific manufacturer of weapons, only lately are we bragging about it.

As Amy Goodman reports on Democracy Now! the recent failed negotiations on a prospective U.N. agreement designed to regulate the world’s $60 billion trade falls squarely in the lap of the United States and the other great weapons maker, Russia. This may not be surprising, of course. Profiting from death and destruction is the American way. But what was surprising was the statement by a state department official saying that foreign military sales have reached record levels this year thanks to aggressive promotion by the Obama administration. He was not being facetious.

American weapons are good, you see. Anyone else’s are bad. Ours are used only for the most noble purposes; used by anyone else, weapons are evil. If we killed you, you deserved it. If you were on Obama’s death list, your name was carefully selected with full appreciation for your constitutional rights.

Two days ago, the Associated Press released a hilarious article about arms sales in the Persian Gulf. Guess we all know by now that anything out of the AP is inherently warped but this unattributed piece out of Dubai is pretty amazing propaganda just the same. Check the first paragraph:

“While Iran’s military loudly trumpets every new project or purported advance in hopes of rattling the United States and its Persian Gulf allies, the United States is quietly answering with an array of proposed arms sales across the region as part of a wider effort to counter Tehran.”

And the next:

“In the past two months, the Defense Department has notified Congress of deals totaling $11.3 billion to gulf states such as Qatar and Kuwait, which are seen as some of America’s critical front line partners in containing Iran...”

Okay, Obama didn’t invent this lunacy. It’s been going on since before World War II. Even the postwar Marshall Plan, much heralded in ‘liberal’ quarters, distributed more than nine of every ten dollars to military recipients.

But the sheer duplicity of the Obama regime and its media sidekicks is just about stupefying. Consider the actual situation with respect to Iran.

The U.S. and Israel and, to a lesser degree, other western imperial countries, have been accusing Iran of having or seeking nuclear weapons. The foreign policy designed around this accusation is twofold: first, we are implementing increasingly nasty economic sanctions –– the whores in Congress passed another resolution authorizing further tightening just yesterday; second, if Iran does not disarm we will attack it with a level of weaponry unmatched in savagery and destruction.

Iran is not trying to “rattle” the United States and the U.S. is not “quietly answering.” In fact, it is America which is trying to rattle Iran, and not very quietly. The sanctions themselves, as a few rather lonesome commentators have pointed out, are acts of war. We and Israel have had agents inside Iran for years assassinating its scientists. America is already waging war against Iran and threatening to escalate into wholesale destruction unless that country surrenders its sovereignty.

The Obama administration, along with the media, has turned reality on its head. The threatened becomes the wielder or threats; the victim becomes the victimizer. Israel, which has by all accounts dozens of thermonuclear warheads in control of an obviously crazy and unstable leadership, is considered responsible. The United States, which has squandered its wealth on enough nuclear tonnage to blow up the entire planet thousands of times over, is considered sane. It is Iran which is nuts.

Most Americans are so brainwashed they believe this. They believe it even though just a dozen years ago the same lies were being peddled about Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction –– the nonexistence of which became a source of jokes by Bush –– had to be dismantled by Saddam Hussein or we would attack them. The neighborhood bully with an Uzi telling a child to empty his empty pockets or face death.

Historically, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the spending of American cash on weaponry in other nations is a reliable predictor of a police state future. We claim we want to promote democracy but of course that is a lie. We want to kill democracy. Democracy is a threat to the superimposition of U.S. international power.

I don’t know much about the current situation in Syria but I know that whichever side my country is on is against democracy. Only willful ignorance supports a different view. We have more than 800 military bases in 150 countries around the world. They are there to enforce our hegemony. They are there to make sure that nobody opposes America.

Recently, Obama announced that he was exploring ways to award medals to U.S. troops whose proximity to the battlefield is no closer than the windowless war rooms from which deadly killing machines are computer targeted on human beings. I guess it’s brave to kill people by remote control.

At the same time, Syrian President Bashar Assad has begun to hide from U.S. attempts to kill him, moving his base of operations. In commenting on this tactic, U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell, said: “We think it is cowardly, quite frankly, to have a man hiding out of sight...”

Assad, apparently, is not being a brave man. Perhaps if he could hang out in one of those computer rooms from which drones are sent to attack funeral processions, he could qualify for a medal but not if he insists on resisting the United States and its paid killers. Coward.

Still alive tonight, last word, but it’s a new day in Syria. Maybe Hillary Clinton will get to dance another one of her jigs.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who in 1967 called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Still true today. I’m so proud.