Volume 8, Number 51
September 23, 2007
September 23, 2007
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"FRESH WITH YOUR COFFEE, EVERY SUNDAY MORNING"® SINCE 1999
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"FRESH WITH YOUR COFFEE, EVERY SUNDAY MORNING"® SINCE 1999
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Overt Ops
Everyone's well accustomed to amateur videos getting so many hits that they wind up in heavy rotation on the networks' news offerings. While much attention was paid to the man who was tased even though he called the campus policeman his "bro," the more nuanced, even ironic angle to the story was that a dissenter to Iraq policy has better luck disturbing an appearance by someone like Senator Kerry than the president, vice-president or others in the upper echelons of government. Still, to beat up on Kerry, as Mr. Meyer was trying to do, is merely to walk through the door opened for him by all these years of setting up the Democrats to take Dubbya's fall. (Anyone at MoveOn.org have a clue? Anyone?) It isn't just Congress but the populace as a whole which was appealed to in that time of pulling together, only to be kicked square in the privates. Dubbya is worse than the sum of all the covert ops whose revelations have wounded the nation's prestige and made tragedy of his oath of office. "You can't talk me out of thinking freedom's a good thing!" pops out of the Draper biography, Dead Certain, as the textbook ploy. There's the follow-up that is never entertained. The discipline of the big lie is that any possible errant thought by your adversaries is met with a barrage of irrelevant and often irrational misdirections. Joe Conason, writing at Salon, revealed some of the blowback from the usual administration apologists to an appearance of his on cable's Hardball, where the host described this now oft-repeated clip from Florida as iconic in Bush's history of degradation of liberties. Limbaugh's synopsis spoke for much of the Bush-friendly echo chamber: "You have a liberal kid at a liberal college campus, listening to a liberal Democrat former presidential candidate and current senator. He raises hell, will not shut up. They Taser the guy, and liberals say, 'See what Bush has wrought?'" Conason was not prepared to let puff-baggery rule the day as he stuck up for Chris Matthews, writing "he was addressing a subtler and more disturbing problem: the gradual diminution of constitutional freedoms and, specifically, the freedom to assemble peaceably, to speak and to protest in a political environment dominated by war, terror and 'security.'" If you tune into Rush Limbaugh with an open mind, looking for a well rounded presentation, even debate of the issues, it will make you heartsick. Conason moved on to the kind of stage-managed version of the people's business for which Dubbya has become infamous. "It is unlawful to bar individuals from public events because they have the wrong bumper stickers on their cars, or wear the wrong T-shirts, or belong to the wrong organizations, or have written the wrong letters to the editor of their local newspaper, as the president's advance agents have repeatedly done over the past six years." There was recently a decision in Ranks v. Jenkins, in which a heavily redacted (revealing nonetheless) copy of the play book for staging these public events was introduced into evidence. The overall story (the legacy if you will) is made bleak by these kinds of revelations. The right way in America, evidently, is not reason. The people in charge of our nation's business are those same characters who in high school countered the coaching of teachers to think for oneself with promises of status, friendships and all the other adolescent wishes on the menu. Admission was cheap back then - just fit in. Nothing's changed. Dubbya's offerings have sometimes included performances by Brooks and Dunn. Gosh! Tickets to these events (protected at taxpayer expense) would more often than ever go to cloned copies of the new president of the local Chamber, who at the Christmas fundraiser in Insert-Your-Town-Name-Here, publicly decried liberals and liberalism. Here, here! Bravo! Here's your ticket. The president and Brooks and Dunn. Can it get any better than that? That's how he got elected and re-elected; oh, and there are serious intimations of covert ops in getting there, too. But let's stipulate that the past is behind us. Factor in overt ops like the bait and switch he has perpetrated in broad daylight on so many issues, and the relentless, barely worthy of high schoolers false arguments, and you have to believe he's deluded to think that history just needs to come around and anoint, already. He's heading toward a ten worst list, the chucklehead. The same way Iraq just might maybe be heading toward civil war.
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