Here is the forty-ninth article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s honoree is Jared Padgett. He is so honored for finding a Second Amendment Solution to the sin problem for Republican Supply-side Jesus (the exact opposite of the real Jesus). It is the first time this award has gone to a minor or been awarded posthumously.

The diary of the 15-year-old Oregon high schooler who shot and killed a classmate and injured a teacher before turning the gun on himself revealed that the teen was a religious fundamentalist who was out to kill “sinners.”

According to the New York Daily News, freshman Jared Padgett was known at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Gresham, OR as being quiet, but was “highly regarded for his spirituality” by church elders.

Padgett walked into Reynolds High School last Tuesday carrying “an AR-15 type rifle, a semi-automatic handgun, ammunition and a large knife,” and opened fire, killing freshman Emilio Hoffman. Portland’s KGW reported that police found the teenager’s journal while searching through the belongings he left behind.

A police source told the TV station that Padgett did not name specific students or teachers in his plans, but was rather on a mission to cleanse the world of “sinners.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Raw Story>

Here’s the video.

As long as Republican Supply-side pseudo-Christians keep preaching violence as a means of enforcing their invasive piety codes on others, they forfeit the claim that there is no blood on their hands, when one of their own acts it out.

There was never any doubt, after the Bush Reich toppled the dictator that held Iraq together, that the nation was destined for long term, pent-up sectarian strife.  The Maliki regime concentrated all power in  the hands of the Shia faction, and it was only a matter of time before the Kurds and Sunnis rebelled.  The Republican Party is doing what Republicans always do in a case like this.  They are blaming Obama for what Bush did, and trying to get us back into the war.  Don’t do it!  Hands off Iraq!

This is what Maliki did with all the money and manpower we invested in training his army.

Observers around the world are stunned by the speed and scope of this week’s assaults on every major city in the upper Tigris River Valley — including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city — by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. But they shouldn’t be. The collapse of the Iraqi government’s troops in Mosul and other northern cities in the face of Sunni militant resistance has been the predictable culmination of a long deterioration, brought on by the government’s politicization of its security forces.

The politicization of the Iraqi military

For more than five years, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his ministers have presided over the packing of the Iraqi military and police with Shiite loyalists — in both the general officer ranks and the rank and file — while sidelining many effective commanders who led Iraqi troops in the battlefield gains of 2007-2010, a period during which al Qaeda in Iraq (the forerunner of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) was brought to the brink of extinction.

Al-Maliki’s "Shiafication" of the Iraqi security forces has been less about the security of Iraq than the security of Baghdad and his regime. Even before the end of the U.S.-led "surge" in 2008, al-Maliki began a concerted effort to replace effective Sunni and Kurdish commanders and intelligence officers in the key mixed-sect areas of Baghdad, Diyala and Salaheddin provinces to ensure that Iraqi units focused on fighting Sunni insurgents while leaving loyal Shiite militias alone — and to alleviate al-Maliki’s irrational fears of a military coup against his government.

In 2008, al-Maliki began replacing effective Kurdish commanders and soldiers in Mosul and Tal Afar with Shiite loyalists from Baghdad and the Prime Minister’s Dawa Party, and even Shiite militia members from the south. A number of nonloyalist commanders were forced to resign in the face of trumped up charges or reassigned to desk jobs and replaced with al-Maliki loyalists. The moves were made to marginalize Sunnis and Kurds in the north and entrench al-Maliki’s regime and the Dawa Party ahead of provincial and national elections in 2009, 2010 and 2013…

Inserted from <CNN>

30,000 Iraqi soldiers turned tail and ran from 800 fighters.

Those of you who remember Vietnam should be getting a sense of déjà vu from current events in Iraq.

Rachel Maddow covered this story in two parts. Apologies in advance for the intros.  In the first she puts the current situation in Iraq in the historical contest of the War in Vietnam.

In the second, she covers the Republican lies used to get us into the that GOP war for oil and conquest, and how Republicans are lying now want to get us back into that war, just as they tried to get is back into Vietnam.

Long before Barack Obama became President, I said that no so-called coalition government could stand in Iraq. I suggested that the country would be better off as three separate entities, with a federal structure solely to share oil revenues among them. The Maliki regime has proven to be just as corrupt as the Chalabi regime that the Bush Reich tried to impose on that nation. It will fall. The only question is when.

The best thing the US can do is stay away and let them deal with it themselves. Otherwise, we will only make a bigger mess of that nation than we already have. When they return to some semblance of order in their own way, we should recognize our national culpability and provide humanitarian (NOT military) aid.

Moreover, we need to stop the cycle economic imperialism. We need to allow nations to manage their own resources for the benefit of their own people, not install dictators to manage them for the benefit of American vulture capitalists.