Monday, February 28, 2005

Gates of delirium

Father Greeley asks the unasked question?

How long can Bush get away with lies?

As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course. The White House propaganda mill will hail it as another victory for the president and ignore the fact that most Europeans still consider the war dangerous folly and the president a dangerous fool.

One hears new rationalizations for the war on this side of the Atlantic. After the hearings on Secretary of State Rice, a Republican senator, with all the self-righteous anger that characterizes many such, proclaimed, "The Democrats just have to understand that the president really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." This justification is not unlike the one heard frequently at the White House, "The president believed the intelligence agencies of the world."

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?


Note that he's not talking about a lack of commitment to truth, he said lies. Would that the good Father could spread his message far and wide, as the MSM surely hasn't done.

Greeley also spreads his blame to the Three Stooges:

Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud. "Judge" Gonzales said the Geneva Convention was "quaint" and in effect legitimated the de facto policy of torture. Rumsfeld repealed the "Powell Doctrine" -- only go to war when you have the massive force necessary to win decisively and quickly. Brilliant businessman that he is (like Robert McNamara of the Vietnam era), he thought he could win with 130,000 (unlike at least 200,000 as the army chief of staff insisted) and hence made the current "insurgency" inevitable.

More has been said about that. In this bizzarro world, failure is rewarded with praise; deceit with employment. As Chris Rock said tonight at the Oscars, "Imagine if you work at the Gap, and your drawer is short by 13 trillion dollars. And then you attack Banana Republic because they are selling toxic tank tops. And after everyone's dead, you discover they weren't even selling tank tops!" (paraphrased, sorry)

The presence of these three towering giants in the administration certainly confirms that the president is confident that he is "right" on Iraq and that he has a mandate from the American people and from God which confirms that he is "right."

Nothing, in other words, has changed in the last two years. The war is still the "right thing to do," it is still part of the "war against terrorism," it is still essential to keep Arabs from blowing up our skyscrapers.

You can still get away with the "big lie" as long as Karl Rove and his team of spinners keep providing persuasive rationalizations. The American public is still supine, uneasy about the war, but not willing yet to turn decisively against it. Will that still be the case next year when we "celebrate" the third anniversary of the war? Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?


As someone once said, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. Or as Bob Dole said back in '96, "Where's the outrage?" Republicans have mastered the art of feigned outrage when someone assaults their decency-SpongeBob is a corrupting force on our kids says James Dobson. But when deaths are involved, lies told, citizen's rights and money stolen, well, somehow the glance is turned away, and the gaze focuses on other issues, like the alleged harrassment of "legitimate journalist" and paid gay excort James "Jeff Gannon" Guckert.

Makes me proud to be an American.

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