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& the Corporate Cartel Love War |
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By BuckcuB
But they aren't stomping and pounding, except in public in front of TV cameras and at fundraising dinners. Actually, the right-wingers are dancing a jig of joy to rival any leprechaun with a fresh pot o' gold and a belly full of Jameson's. After a terrifying decade of issue poverty, the Republican right has its beloved Cold War back. Hooray! Who needs Reds under the bed? Osama bin Laden is lying in wait beneath America's plush berths, waiting until we turn out the light so he can reach out and strangle us while praising Allah, or so the right-wing would have us believe. Did America think this war on terrorism would be a quick, surgical action, narrowly focused on eliminating bin Laden's terrorist cells with all possible haste? Uh- uh. Not if the right wing gets its way! As Vice- President Dick Cheney told the press, this is a war that "...may not be won in our lifetime." Now, BuckcuB concedes that the concept of "lifetime" may be a little different for the average Joe than for Cheney, who is on his fourth (or is it fifth?) heart attack. But the inference is clear: this war is, in the right wings' view, going to go on for a long, long, LOOOONG time. Long enough to pump more billions back into our pared-down military, necessitating of course the development of new warfare technologies by the corporate vampires with their fangs buried in the neck of the taxpayers' Treasury.
Lately, Bush counsels the American people to be patient. "This isn't a Kodak moment," the Shrub announced recently, prompting BuckcuB to wonder if Eastman-Kodak is getting its share at the anti-terror pork barrel. Of course, Bush must counsel patience -- he has no other choice. The war must be allowed to drag on until every conceivable partisan advantage has been sucked out of the situation; until every dime of tax revenue which can conceivably be labeled "for anti- terrorism" has been ladled out to his corporate cronies. But things could be worse -- it's only money, after all. We COULD be living in one of those awful countries where government agents can kick down your door at any hour of the day or night; drag you away without showing a warrant or even telling you what you're charged with; hold you in detention almost indefinitely without telling your family or even your lawyer where you're being held or why, and still without telling you about any specific charges. Oooops! Wait -- we already DO live in one of those countries: the United States of America. That's right, folks. Over the past couple of weeks, the right-wing leadership of Congress took a bill which contained some sensible security precautions, and re-wrote it, literally in the middle of the night. Then the next day they shoved it to the floor of the House and Senate for a vote, even though fewer than a third of the members of Congress had read the new bill or even had any notion what was contained therein. And the right-wing got their bill passed, by making not-so-subtle threats that the patriotism of any Congressperson who voted in opposition would be called -- publicly -- into question. And that bill, folks, does indeed permit agents of our government to do exactly what Buckcub has described above. "Oh, c'mon, that kind of thing can't happen in America! You're exaggerating, BuckcuB!" you chuckle, dear reader. If only it were exaggeration, but it isn't. Americans now live in a police state as potentially repressive and fascistic as any benighted Balkan backwater.
Not wishing to refresh the American public's remembrance of body-bags lined up on the tarmac at air bases everywhere, a' la Vietnam, the Bush Bunch is attempting to recycle Bill Clinton's clever air-power-only strategy, with which the brilliant former president quickly smashed troubles in the Balkans while avoiding all but a paltry few American casualties. But mountainous, cave-pocked Afghanistan is not hilly, swampy Bosnia. The same tactics won't work. Neither are fanatical Islamic extremists of the same stripe as bitter Balkan ethnic separatists. The former believe they get to go to Heaven and screw gorgeous perpetual virgins for all eternity if they die in battle against the infidel. The latter mostly hoped there would be enough nails to build a halfway-decent coffin if they died in battle. So U.S. military "experts" were a little stunned when their most-recent grandstand ploy didn't work out. They'd ordered the dropping of "daisy cutters" on the Taliban front lines. (The squeamish may wish to scroll down now.) "Daisy cutters," for the uninitiated, are very large bombs of about 7 tons each. They are the ordnance equivalent of Heavenly Hash ice cream -- containing shrapnel, incendiaries, percussives, you name it. On detonation, they typically incinerate everything within a 100 to 200 yard radius, and shred/burn/blast everything else within a 500 yard radius (that's roughly the size of five football fields.) They are a weapon of such horrific destructive power that they are used to utterly demoralize the enemy against which they are used. But that didn't happen with the Taliban troops. They weren't utterly demoralized, not even a tiny bit demoralized. They did not, as expected, emerge shrieking for mercy and vowing surrender, from the acrid clouds of the explosions. Islamic extremists are a whole different breed of enemy, and the Pentagon has yet to realize that fact. The Pentagon, too, has yet to realize the fact that the Afghan "Northern Alliance," enemies of the Taliban and the natives whom we are helping in their rebellion, hate America's guts at least as savagely as do the Taliban themselves. We have decided to throw our lot in with the Northern Alliance to help us defeat the "bad guys," while ignoring the known fact that the Northern Alliance are bad guys, too. And about two nanoseconds after we help them to overthrow the Taliban, the Northern Alliance is going to turn on their American enablers with the savagery of a bitter grudge-holder. Sure, they'll use the United States to get what they want -- and the instant they've got it, hey! -- "Death To America" and "Yankee Go Home" and all the rest of it will come bursting from our erstwhile allies. Meanwhile, Bush is developing the habit of interrupting reasonably-entertaining television programming (usually on a Thursday evening) with pathetic, staged pep rallies for America.
If it weren't for the horrific threat facing the United States, this entire situation would be a hugely-amusing farce. As things stand, however, the situation is instead a farce but a terrifying farce. The unscripted walk-ons are the best part -- Pentecostal fanatic Attorney General John Ashcroft appearing on T.V. to announce that there's "credible information" that terrorists may target one or more of California's major bridges, without providing any details -- and then, two days later, announcing that the threat information was not credible at all. In between, Ashcroft decided that Oregon doctors shouldn't be allowed to use controlled drugs to help terminal patients end their lives under Oregon's assisted-suicide law, and threatened criminal arrests for any doctor who prescribed such drugs for that use. Gee whiz -- it's okay to drop incinerator bombs on the Taliban, but my goodness we mustn't permit American citizens dying in hideous pain to take a dignified leave of life with legal, safe and effective narcotics. Can it get any more bizarre? You BET it can! America now possesses a "patriotism police" to monitor the media and attack any comment, statement, or opinion deemed insufficiently kowtowing to Bush and the Bush Administration. The usual suspects are behind this patriotism cabal -- Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and their conservative cohorts. These demented demagogues urge their public to take action against those who dare to criticize the Bush government during this time of war. That action being to have the critics removed from any position wherefrom they can make their criticism public. Of course, Limbaugh, Drudge, and their ilk seem to have forgotten that American troops are fighting to preserve such hallowed American constitutional rights as the right to criticize the government publicly, without fear of reprisal. The Taliban have nothing on these folks! The new Patriotism Police have repression and intimidation and coercive blackmail down to a nasty little science. Bush et al have pushed one sensible idea: that Americans should get on with their normal, everyday lives. Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that Bush and Ashcroft and their cronies have terrified American citizens pointlessly with unsubstantiated dire warnings, while counseling normality at the same time, BuckcuB must support this call. We should live our normal lives. Which ought certainly to include well-deserved, harsh, and public criticism of George Bush and his lame administration! A case in point: Bush recently announced that Osama bin Laden was seeking to acquire nuclear (although he pronounced it "nuke-you-lur") weapons, "evil weapons" as Georgie dubbed them. Um -- and how would those be different from our little Midwestern silo-forest of ICBM's? Are atomic bombs pure as the driven snow in our hands, but "evil weapons" if bin Laden gets his hands on a nuke instead? More inanity! This, folks, is what we get for keeping our collective mouths shut about the open theft of the highest office in the land. Has anyone stopped to consider the fact that the terrorists waited to make their hideous attack until Bush was in office? They would not have dared do so with Clinton in the White House, because Clinton was brilliant and possessed an innate talent for choosing the right response, even if he did have a little trouble keeping his trousers zipped. We are stuck with the Shrub and his cronies. It is said, alas, that people get the government which they deserve. For once, BuckcuB thinks that the platitude is wrong. We don't deserve this government. We didn't want it. We didn't vote for it. It was shoved down our throats. And now we are just beginning to pay the price of having a puppet president and a corporate cartel running the day-to-day governance of the most powerful nation on the planet. You do not have to show support for a pack of fakes and mountebanks and war profiteers, in the interest of supporting the United States and all that our nation and our Constitution stands for. We will prevail over terrorism. The question is, will we do so with honor and mercy, or will we do so with jingoism and the kind of fake patriotism which allows profiteers to operate without criticism? |
Dick Cheney: This will be a long war 
BuckcuB is not a fan of war of any kind. War is
brutal, it is barbaric, it is the greatest of human failings -- a
holdover from the prehistoric days of savage tribalism
and congenital ethnocentrism. But, my friends, if we
must have war, must we have such a half-assed war as
this just so Bush & Co., Inc., can reap maximum profit
with minimum political damage?
We interupt your regularly scheduled broadcast ... again 