They
Know no Shame
This
anonomous AOL board posting from July 7th,2004 is brought to you here
from the folks at: FreshChaos.com
Despite the worst foreign policy blunder
in American history, George W. Bush and his millionaire supporters don't
know the meaning of the word shame.
Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit,
Fox News-produced photo-op on the Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner
that read "Mission Accomplished," the shaming truth is that
everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many
of us predicted it would go wrong--if anything more hopelessly wrong
than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic train wreck,
and there's not a single American citizen who's going to walk away unscathed.
The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so much deceit exposed,
would have brought on mass resignations or votes of no confidence in
any free country in the world. In Japan not long ago, there would have
been ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling themselves with
samurai swords. Yet up to this point--at least to the point where we
see grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over piles of naked
Iraqis--neither the president, the vice president nor any of the individuals
who urged and designed this debacle have resigned or been terminated--or
even apologized. They have betrayed no familiarity with the concept
of shame.
Thousands of young Americans are dead, maimed or mutilated, 100 billion
has been wasted and all we've gained is a billion new enemies and a
mouthful of dust--of sand. Chaos reigns, but in the midst of it we have
this presidential election. George Bush has defined himself as a war
president, and it's fitting that he should die by the sword--in fact
fall on it, and quick. But even now the damned polls don't guarantee,
or even indicate, his demise.
Conventional wisdom says that an incumbent president with a $200 million
war chest cannot be defeated, and that one who commands a live, bleeding,
suffering army in the field is doubly invincible. By this logic, the
most destructively incompetent president since Andrew Johnson will be
rewarded with a second term. That would probably mean a military draft
and more wars in the oil countries and, under visionaries like Dick
Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a chance for the United States to emulate
19th-century Paraguay, which simultaneously declared war on Brazil,
Argentina and Uruguay and fought ferociously until 90 percent of the
male population was dead.
What hope then? Impeachment is impossible when the president's party
controls both houses of Congress, though Watergate conspirator John
Dean, who ought to know, claims in his new book that there are compelling
legal arguments for a half-dozen bills of impeachment against George
W. Bush. Peer pressure? At the White House, world opinion gets no more
respect than FBI memos or uncomfortable facts. Many Americans seem unaware
that scarcely anyone on the planet Earth supported the Iraq adventure,
no one anywhere except the 40-50 million Republican loyalists who voted
for George Bush in 2000.
Among significant world leaders he recruited only Great Britain's Tony
Blair--whose career may be ruined because most Britons disagree with
him--and the abominable Ariel Sharon, that vile tub of blood and corruption
who recently used air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a paraplegic
in a wheelchair at the door of his mosque. (Palestinians quickly squandered
any sympathy or moral advantage they gained from this atrocity by strapping
a retarded 16-year-old into a suicide bomber's kit. Such is the condition
of the human race in the Middle East, variously known as the Holy Land
or the Cradle of Civilization.) Says Sharon, oleaginously, of Bush:
"Something in his soul committed him to act with great courage
against world terror."
The rest of the known world, along with the United Nations, has been
dead set against us from the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks
to our tax dollars and the well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies
of our children--though mostly children from lower-income families--George
Bush and his lethal team of oil pirates, Cold Warriors and Likudists
commands the most formidable military machine on earth. No nation, with
the possible exception of China, would ever dare to oppose them directly.
But the Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one can stop
these people except you and me, and the other 100 million or so American
citizens who may vote in the November election. This isn't your conventional
election, the usual dim-witted, media-managed Mister America contest
where candidates vie for charm and style points and hire image coaches
to help them act more confident and presidential. This is a referendum
on what is arguably the most dismal performance by any incumbent president--and
inarguably the biggest mistake. This is a referendum on George W. Bush,
arguably the worst thing that has happened to the United States of America
since the invention of the cathode ray tube.
One problem with this referendum is that the case against George Bush
is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to sound like a bitter partisan.
I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam Hussein facing a haystack
of incriminating evidence that comes almost to my armpit.
What matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to look for the
smoking gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo, we have
Gettysburg and Sevastopol, we have enough gun smoke to cause asthma
in heaven. I'm overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this mountain
of paper and immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack, among
hundreds of quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one thing
leaped out at me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony of
Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's vice-Fuhrer
poisoned himself in his jail cell: "It is always a simple matter
to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is
easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce
the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
It works the same in every country."
Goering's dark wisdom gained weight when a friend called me and reported
that Vice President Cheney was so violently partisan in his commencement
speech at Westminster College in Missouri--so rabid in his attacks on
John Kerry as an anti-American peace-marching crypto-communist--that
the college president felt obliges to send the student body an e-mail
apologizing for Cheney's coarseness.
If you think it's exceptionally shameless for a man who dodged Vietnam
to play the patriot card against a decorated veteran, remember that
Georgia Republicans played the same card, successfully, against Sen.
Max Cleland, who suffered multiple amputations in Vietnam. In 2001 and
2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli, Karl Rove, approved political
attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and other Democratic
senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
And somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each other with
a schnapps.
Am I polarized? I've never been a registered Democrat, I'm sick of this
two-party straitjacket, I wish to God it didn't take Yale and a major
American fortune to create a presidential candidate. The only current
Democratic leaders who show me any courage are Nancy Pelosi and old
Bob Byrd--Hillary Clinton has been especially cagy and gutless on this
war--and John Kerry himself may leave a lot to be desired. He deserves
your vote not because of anything he ever did or promises to do, but
simply because he did not make this sick mess in Iraq and owes no allegiance
to the sinister characters who designed it. And because his own "place
in history," so important to the kind of men who run for president,
would now rest entirely on his success in getting us out of it.
Kerry made a courageous choice at least once in his life, when he came
home with his ribbons and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But
Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a stiff, a punk, an alcoholic and he'd
still be a colossal improvement over the man who turned Paul Wolfowitz
loose in the Middle East. The myth that there was no real difference
between Democrats and Republicans, which I once considered seriously
and which Ralph Nader rode to national disaster four years ago, was
shattered forever the day George Bush announced his cabinet and his
appointments for the Department of Defense.
I'm aware that there are voters--40 million?--who don't see it this
way. I come from a family of veterans and commissioned officers; I understand
patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out of Air Force One
wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would salute and sing "Hail
to the Chief." Cultivating these reliable patriots, President Bush
cultivated his patriots by spending $46 million on media in the month
of March alone. Somehow I'm on his mailing list. (Is that because my
late father, with the same name, was a registered Republican, or can
Bush afford to mail his picture to every American with an established
address?) Twice a week I open an appeal for cash to crush John Kerry
and the quisling liberal conspiracy, and now I own six gorgeous color
photographs of the president and his wife. I'm sure some of my neighbors
frame the president's color photographs, and fill those little blue
envelopes he sends us with their hard-earned dollars.
I struggle against the suspicion that so many of my fellow Americans
are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with my neighbors, I want
to engage these lost Americans. What makes you angry, neighbor? What
arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that this administration
made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key intelligence that might
have prevented the 9-11 catastrophe, then exploited it to justify the
pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with
al Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct reportage from
cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders Richard Clarke and Paul
O'Neill.
If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction,"
it was only because the Pentagon gave them to him. As Kevin Phillips
recounts in American Dynasty, officials of the Reagan and first Bush
administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms while he was using
chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent Donald Rumsfeld to court
Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in the glorious prime
of his monsterhood.
This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was briefly called "Iraqgate,"
and, yes, among the names of those officials implicated you'll find
most of the engineers of our current foreign policy. (They also signaled
their fractious client, Saddam, that it might be all right to overrun
part of Kuwait; you remember what happened when he tried to swallow
it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does it worry you that Dick Cheney,
as president of the nefarious Halliburton Corporation, sold Iraq $73
million in oilfield services between 1997 and 2000, even as he plotted
with the Wolfowitz faction to whack Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with
its CEO's seat still warm from Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts
worth up to $15 billion for the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a
billion dollars a month from this bloody disaster? Not to mention its
$27.4 million overcharge for our soldiers' food.
These are facts, not partisan rhetoric. Do any of them even make you
restless? The cynical game these shape-shifters have been playing in
the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000 pages of text.
But the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and beggars belief.
If there's one American who actually believes that Operation Iraqi Freedom
was about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you, my friend, are too
dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting booth.
Does it bother you even a little that the personal fortunes of all four
Bush brothers, including the president and the governor, were acquired
about a half step ahead of the district attorney, and that the royal
family of Saudi Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other Bush
family enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that it's much easier
to establish links between the Bush and bin Laden families than any
between the bin Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad Chalabi,
the administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in Baghdad, whose
personal fortune was established when he embezzled several hundred million
from his own bank in Jordan and fled to London to avoid 22 years at
hard labor? That's just a sampling from my haystack. Maybe I can reach
you as an environmentalist, one who resents the gutting of key provisions
in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange County, chiefly a rural area, was
recently added to a national register of counties with dangerously polluted
air.
You say you vote for the president because you're a conservative. Are
you sure? I thought conservatives believed in civil liberties, a weak
federal executive, an inviolable Constitution, a balanced budget and
an isolationist foreign policy. George Bush has an attorney general
who drives the ACLU apoplectic and a vice president who demands more
executive privilege (for his energy seances) than any elected official
has ever received. The president wants a Constitutional amendment to
protect marriage from homosexuals, of all things. Between tax cuts for
his high-end supporters and three years playing God and Caesar in the
Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied America's wallet, with a
$480 billion federal deficit projected for 2004, and the tab on Iraq
well over $100 billion and running.
"A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word
means," Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult of
right-wing radicals and "neocons" had begun to define and
assert themselves. Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was
old enough to read his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the wolf--the
lone wolf--and this is the conservatism of sheep.
All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a few slogans from talk
radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at "liberals" and
maybe a name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke, whom most of
them have never read. Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a ludicrous
but not harmless cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the
sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to "a college fraternity prank"
(and who once called Chelsea Clinton "the family dog"--you
don't have to worry about shame when you have no brain).
I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between
Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's
polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people
who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by
the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into
the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world
pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will
test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth
and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust
under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most
sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling
for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.
posted by anonymous on an AOL board 7/9/04
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right
to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-George Orwell
This
anonomous AOL board posting from July 7th,2004 is brought to you here
from the folks at: FreshChaos.com
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