Damn their eyes
Dubbed “The Lone Ranger”, President George Bush has become a pariah within his own party
Dubbed “The Lone Ranger” by Time magazine, President George Bush has now become a pariah within his own party. Shunned by Congressional candidates on his tours of the states, Bush is the toxic epicentre of a Republican midterm meltdown.
Bush’s inscrutable psychobabble continues unabated. Now, in the closing days of the midterm elections the president finds himself consigned to speaking to half-empty arenas in rural Georgia where he spouts volumes of xenophobic Islamophobia and outlines his plan to make individual payments to each and every Iraqi citizen from the coffers of the oil industry. Defining his policy to, “Stay the course,” as changing course every day whenever he gets new advice from the military high-command, Bush defies logic, rationality, pragmatism and reality. Once he extolled himself as a “leader” who stood his ground while his opponents stood on shifting sands, Bush is now the world’s flip-flopper par excellence.
In the midst of political chaos, Bush’s new role is fireman. Whenever a Republican incumbent becomes so threatened that he is about to go down in flames, Bush arrives in Air Force One to speak to a small contingent of faithful troglodytes assembled at some convenient location close to the nearest airfield.
This new assignment gives him something to do other than his full time occupation of wrecking US foreign policy and attacking the American constitution while ridiculing Islamic peoples who control vast oil and mineral resources. While he is now mildly inconvenienced by his campaign duties, Bush can continue to indulge his grandiose fantasies of a new American century from the highest podiums he can find in the rural communities of Kansas and Montana. But, every time he turns away from Washington, another scandal like that of the stalker of underage interns, Congressman Foley, explodes in his face.
Bush’s presidency has reeled from – the political catastrophe in Florida where he lost the election of 2000 before John Roberts and Jim Baker rigged the Supreme Court decision – to the national catastrophe on 9/11. From there, Bush fabricated a series of crises from Afghanistan to Iraq and Iran to terrorize his own people into voting for him in 2004. After demonizing the weak and militarily impotent nations he deemed to be vile as the ‘Axis of Evil,’ that very ‘Axis of Evil’ struck back in 2006 with a devastating military and political defeat for Bush’s puppet state of Israel in their ill-conceived war against Hezbollah. That shocking defeat was swiftly followed by a nuclear blast from North Korea.
Those two events weakened Bush’s presidency to the point that senior members of his own party swiftly stepped in to sever his reins to real political power. Jim Baker, Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have been very busy deconstructing Bush and Cheney’s diabolical plans to launch World War W by attacking Iran this autumn. The Iran War was to be the crowning glory of the neoconservative campaign in the midterm elections, but Baker, Powell and Scowcroft seized the moment of North Korea’s nuclear explosion to force Bush, Cheney and their loyal neoconservative legions to release their grips on the reins of American political power. Ranking Republicans want a return to the calm waters of rationality, and they have begun the painful process by telling the press, “Iraq is lost.”
With their belligerent rhetoric now torn and tattered, the Bush-Cheney White House faces a political holocaust next Tuesday. American voters are incendiary with anger at the Bush-Cheney White House. By a majority of two to one, American voters are opposed to the war in Iraq. A volcanic eruption of political dynamite will explode next Tuesday triggering an earthquake in American history. The seismic proportions will be gigantic, and the tectonic shifts will relegate neoconservativism – as it has been known and practiced by Bush and Cheney – to a grotesque exhibit in the museum of political insanity.
Neoconservativism’s forlorn ghost will linger on in a subliminal existence in the rhetoric of the surviving Republicans and the memories of the rapidly diminishing ranks of the Democratic Leadership Council – as well as a in the torment of a demented golem that will forever haunt the Ultra-Zionists of Israel to remind them all of the collapse of their grand scheme to reshape the map of the world; reorder the ownership of much of its mineral wealth and re-channel its political power into a new American century of brazen xenophobic imperialism.
Even though they are less popular today than they were in 1974 when Watergate was at its zenith, the Republicans still hold several political trumps. They have gerrymandered America into a patchwork of undemocratic and Anti-Democratic constituencies. They have 27 states that use electronic voting machines that cannot provide a paper trail – a dangerous situation that affords precisely zero electoral integrity for their citizens. While they have lost some of the Christian right to the Foley scandal, they still cling to the Christian Zionists who believe in the virtue of nuclear Apocalypse as the safest method to perpetrate Armegeddon, summon the Rapture, launch the Second Coming and survive the Last Judgement.
Other aces up the Republican’s sleeve include racism – a sure-fire vote-getting technique straight out of the pages of the Richard Nixon-Jesse Helms playbook. In Tennessee, the Republicans launched a blatantly racist attack against Democratic candidate for Senate, Harold Ford, with their crude ‘Playboy’ smear featuring a blonde actress to contrast with his Afro-Americanism. This shameful form of racial propaganda was used for decades in the deep south by Helms and others, and it still plays to those voters who long for the return of legalized lynching and that old time religion. In fact, the ‘Playboy’ ad against Harold Ford will bring the crazies out in droves.
Sexism is yet another reliable ace up the Republican sleeve. Nancy Pelosi has been singled out for pillorying by the right-wing elements of the US media in a shameful attack on her as the next Speaker of the House. Any woman voting Republican this year must be slightly confused about her role in society.
Finally, the most powerful ace up the Republican sleeve is the grand old gold standard of election-rigging: poll-jacking. Governor Howard Dean has put Mark Mehlman (Chair of the Republican National Committee) on notice that poll-jacking – denying voters their rights at the polling place on election day – will be met with full-force legal opposition. Nancy Pelosi has published her letter to President Bush demanding that the Justice Department take immediate steps to guarantee minorities their voting rights – for a change. And, the DNC has issued a flight of radio commercials aimed at minorities urging them to take themselves to their polling places where they should demand their rights to vote and declare their stalwart resistance to any attempts to prevent them from voting
The Bush Era’s deconstruction of American democracy is a well-established fact – at least in the international press and media. Here is a quote about the US midterm elections from the current edition of the New Statesman a respected weekly journal published in London,
“All this (analysis) assumes that the elections are fair and honest. It is conceivable that Diebold voting machines were tampered with to bring Bush victory in 2004, which would explain why exit polls predicted victory for John Kerry: they were right. A study published last month by Princeton University has concluded that Diebold’s AccuVote-TS and AccuVote-TSx machines – which will count at least 10 per cent of the nation’s votes – can be infected, in less than a minute and “with little risk of detection”, with a virus designed to favour one candidate.”
America’s global reputation as a democratic society lies in ruins. Worse. The American press and media are now ranked 53rd on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. This decline in status is nothing less than a disgrace, for the United States of America is tied in a dead heat with three other countries: Botswana, Croatia and Tonga – for even that dubious distinction.
While Bush has devoted himself to perfecting his xenophobic and sexist psychobabble, Dick Cheney is devoting himself to the big, big lie. In an illuminating interview with Time, Cheney is reported to have stated,
“We’re in one of the best economies that we’ve had in recent times. Employment is at an all-time record high. Home ownership is at an all-time record high. Productivity has been phenomenal. The stock market is just hitting new highs. Employment numbers are up again — 6.6 million jobs in three years. There isn’t any way you can look at the economy and not conclude that, in fact, things are going very well.”
Taken on its face, the average reader might find Cheney’s statement to contain a mustard seed of truthfulness. In fact, it is a noxious concoction of toxic lies fabricated to distract voters from the hell-on-earth that is Baghdad.
Back home in America, the true case of the US economy under the benighted presidency of George Bush and Richard Cheney, is simple: the United States has one of the worst economies that it has ever had in its long history. Employment is at an all-time high for one simple reason, the population is at an all time high, while the minimum wage in Bush’s America is below that of every other nation in the industrialized world. Home ownership is at a record high only because the housing market has hit a brick wall, and there have been more foreclosures than at any previous time in American history. Productivity has been phenomenal and so has corporate profitability – but these are legacies of the Clinton Era – the most successful economic surge in world history. With its meager ten per cent rise after six years of punishing declines, the Bush Era stock market has not even kept pace with inflation. Under Clinton – the value of American stocks rose over two hundred percent outperforming the Bush-Cheney stock market performance by a factor of at least twenty to one. Job creation is another shell game. While 6.6 million jobs may have been created, Clinton created over 9 million jobs in the same period of his presidency. Cheney’s take on the US economy is nothing less than a tissue of lies.
Iraq is utterly hellish and plunging toward a chaotic post-election aftermath. At this very moment, Baghdad is under extreme pressure and outright siege. Sunni militias control the flow of all traffic and commerce into the city, and Shiite militias control the inner-city. One thousand Iraqis are dying violently every week, and the US death toll hit 102 this month making October the fourth deadliest month of the forty three month conflict. Some US officers fear that Baghdad may implode in a maelstrom of disintegration and plunge into a chaotic civil war any day now. The most earnest hope of most rational Republicans is that Iraq will be Balkanized into ethnic fiefdoms. If that is the case, the entire planet will be besieged with regional oil wars radiating out of the Middle East for generations to come.
Bush and Cheney have deliberately unleashed a monstrous genie from a reservoir containing billions of barrels of oil. They have risked the security of the planet, the security of America and the environment on a reckless and feckless adventure driven by Christian Zionism, misguided intentions for the security of Israel and the phantasmagoric dreams of the greediest and most deluded sectors of the US oil lobby.
In the process, Bush and Cheney have defiled the far from perfect American political system. Today, the damaged and broken state of the US body politic is a universal laughing stock.
History will condemn them.
Damn their eyes.
Prediction – If the American elections were fair and honest, the Republicans would be routed for a decade – or more. Fifty seats would turn over in the House, and the Senate would turn blue. That is not the case. Gerrymandering, poll-jacking, hacking and e-vote rigging, racism and sexism will reduce the Democratic gains considerably. In 2002, Bush had an approval rating of 62% compared to his 37% rating today. In 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating was 41%, and the Republicans gained 52 seats in the House. Today, 80% of Americans will be required to use touch-screen voting machines, and twenty-seven states cannot provide a paper trail to recount elections reliably. God Bless, America.
Excerpts from George W. Bush’s last press-briefing with a group of conservative columnists
Racism and xenophobia are the names of his game, “These guys want to kill.”
While extolling his own fears of Islamist extremism, President Bush laughs at his own remarks about what he deems to be the irrationality of the Iraqi insurgents whom he ridicules as, “cold-blooded killers” driven by: hatred of the US in Iraq, Israel, the Crusades and cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. I wonder what the reaction to this interview would be in a Muslim nation – like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Nigeria or Afghanistan – since it is wreaks of Islamophobia.
Q: You said protecting the country is the number one issue. Some of us were talking the Karl Rove yesterday, and he said, the NRCC believes immigration is a better issue than national security. How does this –
THE PRESIDENT: That’s fine. Look, you talk to the political – I’m just going to tell you what the President thinks.
Q: But you’re going out campaigning.
THE PRESIDENT:
I’m campaigning like mad, and I’m looking at people in the eye and say, you better have a government that does everything in its power to protect you from attack – because that’s what I believe. That’s what I’m living. And you’re right here in the office where I get briefed every morning and it’s on my mind. And I’m telling you it’s on my mind, and I can’t keep it off my mind. I was affected deeply by the attacks of September the 11th. It became clear to me that day that we were at war. And I didn’t need a consultant or a guru or anything to tell me that. I know we’re at war. And we’re still at war, and these guys want to kill. And again, my frame of mind is this: We will press and press and press to protect ourselves. And this stuff about how Iraq is causing the enemy – whatever excuse they need, they have made up their mind to attack, and they grab on to things to kind of justify. But if it’s not Iraq, it’s Israel. If it’s not Israel, it’s the Crusades. If it’s not the Crusades, it is the cartoon. I’m not kidding you. I’m not kidding you. (Laughter.) They are cold-blooded killers.
Q: If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoon – that’s a good slogan.
THE PRESIDENT: No, and I’m serious about this. I haven’t talked – Karl says that the NRCC thinks that. Well, I don’t know who – I don’t know who he’s talking to.
Q: Well, they’re obviously trying to win the House.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
Bush plans to bribe each and every Iraqi civilian through the oil lobby.
In the excerpt below, the president confirms that he supports direct payments to individual Iraqis from national oil income. The president believes this project will unite the nation of Iraq and strengthen its military resolve. In the mind of President Bush, oil and the army are strong unifying factors for any national culture.
Q: What do you think of the proposal of Alaska-style – funding direct payments per individual? It will get you over this problem about the Sunnis getting a fair –
THE PRESIDENT:
Michael, here’s what I think. I think that’s a very intriguing idea. I think there are two elements around which the country can unite: the army and the oil. And I actually brought up this idea when I was with the Maliki government as an idea for them to consider. I said, you ought to look at a trust like they have done in Alaska as an idea on how to unite their country. And Shahristani, that’s the minister for energy, I think, Shahristani –
Q: I think the answer is yes.
THE PRESIDENT:
I actually brought it up with him as an idea – not to say this is – Michael, a lot of this – the government has to come up with – these have to be Iraqi ideas in order for this to be a successful experience. Now, we can plant them. I’m not saying they have to be originated, but they have to say, wow, here’s an idea, let’s do this; as opposed to saying, Americanizing the solution. But we’re working on the oil issue through Zal to convince them that this is an important step forward. Oil should be a unifying element for the country. I can’t tell you exactly the state of play, but I do believe they recognize it as such, and it will put a lot of suspicion and division behind them if they can get it done the right way. And so we agree with you that this is a cause for you. I also believe the army will be, too.
References
Baghdad is under siege
Hometowns across U.S. mourn their war dead
As Vote Nears, Stances on War Set Off Sparks
Bush on Iraq: “When You Get Attacked and Somebody Declares War on You … Fight Back”
Texas Versus Tel Aviv: US Policy in the Middle East
The Lone Ranger (Bush) – He’s faltering in Iraq – He’s out of favor with his own party – He’s increasingly isolated – Why this election is all about George W. Bush and the world he’s created.
Exclusive Interview: Cheney on Elections and Iraq
The Vice President talks to TIME about why he thinks the G.O.P. will maintain control of both the House and Senate, and admits he may have been “premature” in saying “we were over the hump in terms of violence” in Iraq
No magic bullets for Iraq, Bush strategist warns
31 killed in Baghdad blast
Is this the dirtiest election ever? Republicans fear landslide defeat
Republicans bank on money and ‘voter-turnout machine’
As violence grows, oil-rich Kirkuk could hold key to Iraq’s future / Tribal chiefs call for return of Saddam while Kurds eye a new federal state
Afghanistan war is ‘cuckoo’, says Blair’s favourite general
Worldwide Press Freedom Index – 2006 – RSF
