Bombs, Bibles and Bullshit

I'm not surprised at Zogby's poll results. I remember back in the dark days of the Cold War when the University I attended had a symposium on US - Soviet relations and invited the local townspeople to attend. The consensus amongst the patriotic townies was that we should "bomb them back to the Stone Age." That was then, they're just as stupid now.

According to Zogby International, a recent phone poll shows that 52% of Americans favor the bombing of Iran. Amongst the Republicans the number is 71%. A minority of independents and Democrats favor such actions but overall, only 29% of us oppose it.

I'm quite sure that if Bush actually leaves the White House and if the Republicans lose the next election, the scorched earth left behind will include a bombed Iran. This perception serves to and may be designed to frighten voters into supporting whomever they dredge out of the barrel of slime to run against Hillary Clinton. Of course we will get fooled again - and again. We're Americans.

Less is more

There's a lot of diminishing going on - in the mind of Pat Buchanan, that is. When Pat Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank agreed with that former Nixon speech writer who helped the previous pinnacle of corrupt and demented presidencies divide the country with scurrilous arguments, that President Carter's characterization of Dick Cheney as "a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military" is not appropriate for a former president and "diminishes" Carter. Sure, it's the same old argument that obedience is freedom but it's also irony; Buchanan having avoided service by faking a bad knee.

Why is it not appropriate? Beats me. Most Americans dislike Cheney and his intransigence in the face of constant error, constantly contradictory facts and failures of policy. There must be some reason why someone with foreign policy expertise and experience can't say what most people would agree with. (and please take note Ann: he's a committed Christian.) I guess it's the same reason Obama has to wear a tawdry flag pin to prove the required degree of mindless allegiance; or the reason decorated veterans can't give back their medals because of matters of conscience and for the same reason that no one can criticize a general for fudging the figures when there's evidence he has.

Poor Gerald Ford is apparently "diminished" post mortem for criticizing Cheney and Rumsfeld as well, even though I don't think any sane person can argue his right to apply his insight or his right and indeed duty as a public citizen to advocate for better government. But he's diminished, says the man who never thought to diminish the felons he worked for in the Nixon White House - so diminished that the shop worn effigy of Michael Moore can be brought out of the warehouse and propped up against the wall. That's diminishment!

I don't expect much different from that lying old Nixonian hack and supporter of disastrous and bloody wars. I expect that the same old patriotic nonesuch to be performed ad infinitum and I expect the United States, like some angry, lonely and delusional teenager with his diminished ability to deal with reality to reach for the weapons and go out in a blaze of violence.

Fear and loathing at breakfast

"This is the horror of American politics today -- not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed -- but that the only alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our lives with their gibberish for the last twenty years."

I often wish Hunter S. Thompson were still around. Anything I've tried to write about what has happened to the country we both mourned has owed something to him. I've recently begun to read and re-read his voluminous work and Fear and loathing in the Bunker, which appeared in the New York Times on New Year's day 1974 was this morning's breakfast.

Our feelings about Nixon's villainy, his dishonesty, his ambition to rule can easily be transferred to George W. Bush, whose coven includes many of the accessories to Nixon's crimes and in a way, looking at what we're enduring now with only small traces of the reaction that forced Tricky Dick out of office, produces more of those signature emotions than all the fear and loathing of the early 1970's.

On that New Year's day, Thompson was taking some pleasure at the discomfiture of " the main villain of my political consciousness for as long as I can remember." He correctly predicted the coming resignation, but speculated on what tactics President Nixon might chose to remain in power, including:

"A long-term treaty with Russia, arranged by Henry Kissinger, securing Moscow's support of an American invasion, seizure and terminal occupation of all oil-producing countries in the Middle East. . . and give the Federal Government unlimited Emergency powers."

Of course we don't worry too much about Russia any more and don't need their support for the other part of the plan which was a nuclear strike on China. Yes we have some different pawns on the chessboard. China is more threatening for making plastic toys now, but we have Iran and its "terrorists."

Nixon did of course resign, but Nixon's entourage re-entered the mainstream and Pat Buchanan and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and all the Neo-cons and ex cons and Nixonians who populate the Republican Party are carrying on the legacy aided by a much more scientific and powerful ability to manipulate opinion and create false scenarios.

Pat Buchanan compared the Nixon debacle to the tale of Sisyphus. "we rolled the rock all the way up the mountain . . . and it rolled right back down on us." Pat has certainly found other rocks to roll and Bush has rolled that same rock nearly all the way up a new hill and rolled it over us in the process. The fear that he will succeed where Nixon failed and the loathing I feel thinking about how we have done nothing to prevent it and much to promote it must be emotions I shared with the late Mr. Thompson who of course finally succumbed in that second year of Bush's war on Democracy and ended his life.

"Despite all the savage excesses committed by the people he chose to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Richard nixon's cheap and mean-hearted view of the American Dream has ever developed."

Yet there was optimism in 1974:

" It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with "the Government" was either paranoid or subversive."

It didn't last.

" Political candidates, in 1974 at least, are going to have to deal with angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullshit."

Perhaps he underestimated the memory of our born-yesterday, dumbed down, entertainment oriented and gullible fellow Americans and the power of our eternal enemy.

I don't think I'm the suicide type, but I understand the Sisyphean horror, the frustration, the hopelessness that comes from loving the country this should have been; that we hoped it was; that we thought we could make it.

A three hour tour

How far is it from Fantasy Island to Gilligan's Island? Our Iraq experience should give us a clue, but perhaps we'll have an even better fix if what Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center said last week at a meeting organised by The National Interest comes true. According to today's Times of London, Debat said:

"The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days."

We know what the Minnow's three hour tour turned into and we know how the "matter of weeks at most" Iraqi adventure turned out. Can we hope for anything better with a "three day blitz" in Iran? I think we can hope for worse - much worse. Debat believes the Pentagon’s plans for military action involve the use of so much force that they are unlikely to be carried out because they would seriously stretch resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, but of course we have plenty of nuclear weapons and a president that's desperate to win something by doubling up his bets.

Perhaps Bush is trying Richard Nixon's "madman theory" in the hopes that Iran will be afraid and back down, but it didn't work against North Vietnam and I don't know why it seems more likely to work now. Bush is beginning more and more to appear like the frustrated schoolyard bully who has turned everyone against him and out of desperation brings a gun to school.

cross posted at The Reaction

No questions asked

The amazing thing about human nature is the number of people always willing to believe what they're told; to be angry at what they're told to be angry about, hate whom they're told to hate and cheered up by the lies of someone who has lied and lied and lied. There are always those willing to support a leader whether that leader is Gandhi or Idi Amin.

It shouldn't be any surprise that Bush's ratings have improved lately. It's simply because the believaholics have been invited to another media party, where the Bullshit is on tap and it's always happy hour.

Were the July casualty figures good news because they were a bit lower than June's? Are they a tragedy because they're double the July results for last year? How can anyone possible say that we're being given an accurate picture given the relentlessly wrong figures, predictions and pictures since before this war started.

The CNN poll shows that the prodigal sons of bitches, Republicans who had begun to doubt the sanguine but shifty prognostications of the Administration, are beginning to return. It's giving Bush a shot in the arm, we're told, but if anyone is getting a shot in the arm it's the incurable addicts. Apparently the Democrats and independents responding to the poll remain unmoved, but does that matter since they remain powerless, staring at the headlights of a new impending war?

Sure as hell they will be believing whatever they're told about Iran being at the bottom of this all and never questioning this latest round of fabrication and I think the attack everyone is expecting may come before Congress returns to work - if that's what it's called. Right now I see it as a race between World War Three and impeachment and my money says war.