Mythology of Terrorism

Do terrorists exist? Yes, of course, and they exist in many guises. Do some of them want to do us harm? Unquestionably! It's a fact of life in any civilization, and 9/11 brought it home in spades to the U.S. (but let's not forget domestic terrorism like McVeigh in Oklahoma City, or Eric Robert Rudolph in Atlanta and Birmingham).

But the way the Bush administration wants to cast what is really a highly fragmented and variegated collection of terrorist groups into some monolithic threat on the order of the Cold War Soviet regime is a lie on a scale so massive that it can only have a single purpose. The so-called "War on Terror" has been fabricated so that under this phony blanket of fear the fascist-minded zealots can keep chipping away at limits to their power, visibility into our own government, and our very rights as citizens.

The War on Terror is a marketing scheme, designed to collect any threat or act anywhere and put it into the pot of rationalization that this group of thugs keeps stirring and serving up as a gruel of repression. Quit eating this shit! Quit using the term. Start talking about the war on Al Qaeda, or Indonesian bombers, or Islamic extremists in Spain. Get specific.

The reason for this is that how we use language to describe what must be done reveals whether or not we understand--or intend to explain--what our plan is for dealing with the situation. If the police simply talked about our "war on crime" every time a robbery occurred, wouldn't you be asking who did it, where, with what, and how? And yet our news media doesn't seem to want to delve any deeper than the thin porridge of platitudes that Chimpie's gang serves up in steaming bowls.

The threat of terror is real, but it is no more or less than it was four years ago, or ten, or twenty, or fifty. It's a fact of life, but rather than effectively dealing with terrorists, the game is now played to hold up terrorism as a justification for acts by government that are much more of a real threat to our way of life.

Don't be conned. Demand specifics, and demand specific actions. The next time someone says "War on Terror," ask where that war is being waged, with what means, and against whom. These are not phantoms or supermen or boogiemen. And we don't have to surrender to fascist fear-mongering to effectively deal with them. Unless, that is, you're running a corrupt and incompetent evil empire of your own.

The Belly Laugh

Last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, I had myself a truly purging release through laughter. Dave introduced a segment called "The Late Show Response to Bush Spying" (or something like that), bringing up stage manager Biff Henderson, who was standing next to a telephone.

Dave: Take it away, Biff.

Biff: All right, Dave. (Picks up telephone receiver.) Hey Bush. Mind your own fucking business. (Hangs up.)

Dave: And there you have it.

I think I had an abdominal rupture or something after that.

Another chant for the season.

Oh My, More on Impeachment

Go to this Editor and Publisher issue for a great piece on this subject. And they answer the accusation that the MSM is still largely a gargling nest of bum-slurpers:

When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the "I" question in his online chat, he said, "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."

Oh, WaPo, how far you've fallen since Nixon.

Told You So

My relatives, even my wife, have long considered me to be wild-eyed and prone to overstatement with regard to the Bush administration. Two years ago I was severely taken to task for referring to them as a "criminal enterprise," and when I was hollering for impeachment on the basis of the many, many offenses committed against the U.S. Constitution and international law, again my various in-laws told me I was nuts. There was no way that was going to happen, what with a Republican controlled Congress, blah, blah, blah.

Well, friends, the word "impeachment" has now reached a level of play that even the mainstream media is afraid to ignore, and when even those sycophants rise up far enough from their kneepads to clear their throats of Cheney's cock and cough out the "I-word," then things must be in a state of panic inside the White House.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek, who I must grudgingly respect as he seems to have remained an actual journalist instead of an eager-to-swallow stenographer for the Official Word of Emperor Bush, has put the issue front and center.

For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president had “lied us into war.” Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having signed off on the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida. They will respond by calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The “I-word” is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.

And Patrick Fitzgerald is still working on the Karl Rove treasongate issue too.

It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go. Hee-hee-hee.

Time to Impeach, and then Indict

Am I missing something? Here's the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now here's George W. Bush, presidential impostor, lying about how he has authorized violations of this law, from the White House's own website, from April 20, 2004:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Further on in the speech, however, he was frighteninly candid about how far he and his criminal gang were prepared to go:

. And we needed to change the whole attitude about how we protect the homeland. We'll do everything we can to stay on the offensive.

Apparently, even to the point of tossing out the Constitution. Who needs to fear Osama (still on the loose, by the way) when we've got our own domestic forces destroying our protections?

Chimpie Clobbered by Conservative George Will

This is a first for me, I think, but I absolutely must quote George Will in today's Washington Post:

The president's authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency contravened a statute's clear language. Assuming that urgent facts convinced him that he should proceed anyway and on his own, what argument convinced him that he lawfully could?

I think the answser to this is that he, or his controllers, were convinced that he could get away with it. "Urgent facts" or "facts" in general are not anything that this administration feels are relevant to any action they take. Given the timidity of the mainstream media to call him on his blatant lies in his news conference yesterday, I can understand why the Chimpie criminal gang continues to believe that they can violate the law of the land, jeopardize our liberties, and do so with impunity and no fear of prosecution.

Welcome to the North American Banana Republic of the United States. All that is lacking is a flashy uniform with giant epaulets and a gold-braided high-peaked cap for El Presidente.

Chimpie: No Irony Gene?

If you're a Seinfeld fan, then you'll remember the episode where the four characters split up in the subway--Jerry to head to Coney Island, Kramer to pay some fines, George to interview for a job, and Elaine off to a lesbian wedding. At one point, Elaine says to a woman, "That's ironic." The woman says, "What do you mean?" Elaine begins to explain why what she has said is ironic. The woman stops here. "No," she says, "what does 'ironic' mean?"

Don't you imagine a similar conversation with Chimpie Bush if you tried to explain the following as ironic:

After initially refusing to discuss whether he had authorized domestic spying without court approval, President Bush decided to come clean. He acknowledged over the weekend that such spying had taken place, much as it was described in Friday's New York Times. He argued that it was vital to thwart an enemy that knows no boundaries.

And which enemy would that be? Well, the greatest threat to my constitutionally protected personal liberties seems to be a presidential imposter who considers himself completely above the law, who personally, repeatedly, ordered the National Security Agency to spy on citizens, which they could legally do by simply getting a secret court to authorize them. This court, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which almost never refuses such requests (in fact, it has approved over 15,000 of them!), and was instituted to give some oversight to such extraordinary measures, which is all fair and good. But even that little bit of bother is too much for the Chimperor who must at all costs maintain his fantasy of monarchic power, missing the days when he could regularly sign death warrants and rule like Caligula, which may be fine in Texas, but ought not to be considered anything but criminal behavior on the national level.

"An enemy that knows no boundaries." Was he pointing a finger at his temple and winking when he said that?