I Spy A Big Lie
"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
On December 19th, GW Bush foamed at the mouth about how “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said at a White House event. Is the shameful act in question related to fatuous bigmouth Karl Rove and his propensity for blowing the cover of CIA agents? Why, of course not. His outrage came from the seamy revelations of administration-sanctioned domestic spying activities in the NY Times last week.
Using language borrowed from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bush now expects people to believe that political oversight of his administration's conduct equals treason. He just does not get it--American governments cannot in any circumstance spy on its citizens without the prior approval of a judge. Once again Bush has clearly violated the law, and this violation is something that clearly impacts every citizen in this country. This incident is much more insidious than the politically-inspired outing of Valerie Plame, and is an indicator of what the Bush gang believe their administration is entitled to do in the good old US of A.
The law in question came into being in 1978 after the Church Committee's careful study of intelligence community misconduct was concluded. After the agency's wild, crazy, and unfettered days under Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, a new sense of restraint was alleged at Langley headquarters. Of course, this new era at the CIA was wild and crazy in its own way, distorting Soviet missile production capabilities as well as the overall size of the USSR's nuclear arsenal during the massive military buildup under Ronald Reagan. The FBI had also become quite active on the domestic surveillance front during the 1950's and 1960's (as Dr. King's family can attest); the Church Committee's findings painted both agencies as almost completely out of control, and acronyms like COINTELPRO and MK ULTRA made their appearance in the American vernacular.
So despite Mr. Bush's assurances, there is a clear precedent for the misconduct and abuse of power engaged in by American intelligence services. The law that he has broken has been on the books in good standing for nearly thirty years. Bush's defense of his administration's activities in defiance of this law can be broken down logically like this:
1. I am GW Bush, President of the US.
2. I am not subject to the same rigor of the law code as the citizenry.
3. If I break a law, it is not broken--rather, I have appropriately discarded an outdated form of legislation (like the Geneva Convention; the Kyoto Treaty; the Plame affair; etc.) in the pursuit of defending our nation.
Further applications of this line of logic can be directed at the Bill of Rights and many other constitutional concepts. If public discussion of the government's right to spy on its citizens is equated with treason, then the entire Bill of Rights is also obviously suspect. Freedom of speech threatens this concept of the presidency, as does the right of lawful assembly--and such niceties as due process and trial by jury have already been defecated upon by the corpulent, shit-filled asses of the Executive Branch and their counsels.
After the disaster in New York City was allowed to occur on September 11th 2001, Bush and his gang began a quick assault on the basic rights of American citizens in the form of the noxious Patriot Act. Bush has repeatedly defended this nightmarish concept of the American democracy, insisting that the special circumstances of the horror of 9-11-01 required special measures to fight them. These claims make me think back to another instance of a politician who used the political scene of his day to secretly and illegally expand his base of power. A man, like George W. Bush, who received less than 30% of the vote from his country's eligible voters when he "won" the election for his office; a man who took advantage of a violent act in order to institute a bogus state of emergency in his nation which then devolved unlimited and extralegal power upon his office.
That man was Adolf Hitler, and the violent act that spurred his party to absolute power was the fire that destroyed the Berlin Reichstag. Within 12 years of the Reichstag fire Europe was in ruins and the hellish nuclear genie had been let loose from its bottle. Hitler's thousand-year Reich was supposed to be able to destroy its ideological antithesis--Stalinist Communism--but instead the sick racist violence unleashed by the Germans ended up making Stalin and Communism stronger. The Communist philosophy suddenly was not quite so abhorrent to the millions of people who experienced firsthand the horrific tortures of the Nazi regime. As we watch Iraq begin to turn into a Shi'a satellite state of Iran perhaps even the deaf idiots who populate this declining empire might hear echoes of the ghosts of Adolf and Hermann and Josef and Heinrich in the vacuous truth-stretching statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Of course, one of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Bush gang is that the Nazis actually had some success in the ugly business of war before their hideous government was destroyed....
The quote that appears at the beginning of this post is from a report by the OSS. It is a description of Adolf Hitler's political psychology gleaned from Mein Kampf and from those Germans courageous enough to see the Little Corporal for what he really was. These words are also applicable to the disgraceful and disingenuous George W. Bush.
On December 19th, GW Bush foamed at the mouth about how “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said at a White House event. Is the shameful act in question related to fatuous bigmouth Karl Rove and his propensity for blowing the cover of CIA agents? Why, of course not. His outrage came from the seamy revelations of administration-sanctioned domestic spying activities in the NY Times last week.
Using language borrowed from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bush now expects people to believe that political oversight of his administration's conduct equals treason. He just does not get it--American governments cannot in any circumstance spy on its citizens without the prior approval of a judge. Once again Bush has clearly violated the law, and this violation is something that clearly impacts every citizen in this country. This incident is much more insidious than the politically-inspired outing of Valerie Plame, and is an indicator of what the Bush gang believe their administration is entitled to do in the good old US of A.
The law in question came into being in 1978 after the Church Committee's careful study of intelligence community misconduct was concluded. After the agency's wild, crazy, and unfettered days under Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, a new sense of restraint was alleged at Langley headquarters. Of course, this new era at the CIA was wild and crazy in its own way, distorting Soviet missile production capabilities as well as the overall size of the USSR's nuclear arsenal during the massive military buildup under Ronald Reagan. The FBI had also become quite active on the domestic surveillance front during the 1950's and 1960's (as Dr. King's family can attest); the Church Committee's findings painted both agencies as almost completely out of control, and acronyms like COINTELPRO and MK ULTRA made their appearance in the American vernacular.
So despite Mr. Bush's assurances, there is a clear precedent for the misconduct and abuse of power engaged in by American intelligence services. The law that he has broken has been on the books in good standing for nearly thirty years. Bush's defense of his administration's activities in defiance of this law can be broken down logically like this:
1. I am GW Bush, President of the US.
2. I am not subject to the same rigor of the law code as the citizenry.
3. If I break a law, it is not broken--rather, I have appropriately discarded an outdated form of legislation (like the Geneva Convention; the Kyoto Treaty; the Plame affair; etc.) in the pursuit of defending our nation.
Further applications of this line of logic can be directed at the Bill of Rights and many other constitutional concepts. If public discussion of the government's right to spy on its citizens is equated with treason, then the entire Bill of Rights is also obviously suspect. Freedom of speech threatens this concept of the presidency, as does the right of lawful assembly--and such niceties as due process and trial by jury have already been defecated upon by the corpulent, shit-filled asses of the Executive Branch and their counsels.
After the disaster in New York City was allowed to occur on September 11th 2001, Bush and his gang began a quick assault on the basic rights of American citizens in the form of the noxious Patriot Act. Bush has repeatedly defended this nightmarish concept of the American democracy, insisting that the special circumstances of the horror of 9-11-01 required special measures to fight them. These claims make me think back to another instance of a politician who used the political scene of his day to secretly and illegally expand his base of power. A man, like George W. Bush, who received less than 30% of the vote from his country's eligible voters when he "won" the election for his office; a man who took advantage of a violent act in order to institute a bogus state of emergency in his nation which then devolved unlimited and extralegal power upon his office.
That man was Adolf Hitler, and the violent act that spurred his party to absolute power was the fire that destroyed the Berlin Reichstag. Within 12 years of the Reichstag fire Europe was in ruins and the hellish nuclear genie had been let loose from its bottle. Hitler's thousand-year Reich was supposed to be able to destroy its ideological antithesis--Stalinist Communism--but instead the sick racist violence unleashed by the Germans ended up making Stalin and Communism stronger. The Communist philosophy suddenly was not quite so abhorrent to the millions of people who experienced firsthand the horrific tortures of the Nazi regime. As we watch Iraq begin to turn into a Shi'a satellite state of Iran perhaps even the deaf idiots who populate this declining empire might hear echoes of the ghosts of Adolf and Hermann and Josef and Heinrich in the vacuous truth-stretching statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Of course, one of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Bush gang is that the Nazis actually had some success in the ugly business of war before their hideous government was destroyed....
The quote that appears at the beginning of this post is from a report by the OSS. It is a description of Adolf Hitler's political psychology gleaned from Mein Kampf and from those Germans courageous enough to see the Little Corporal for what he really was. These words are also applicable to the disgraceful and disingenuous George W. Bush.
posted by alyosha mcbain at 1:32 PM
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