Another Possibility: the Genius of the Bush/Cheney Plan

In the previous post, I posited that the Chimperor and his gang had essentially contributed to a worsening of situations across the board, and the commentary got pretty heated. What if there is something both we, the so-called "Bush-haters" and their opposite, "the Bush-crack-lickers" had all gotten wrong?

What if total chaos is the overriding goal of this gang of miscreants? After all, even I wouldn't argue that Bush and company actually tried to fuck up on every single thing they touched. No one wants to be a total incompetent all the time. Or do they?

If you have investment interests in oil, or in armaments suppliers, or in shipping, or in security firms, or in big pharma, then destabilization of currencies, energy supplies, governments, security, travel, and the creation of a more fearful world are going to make you very, very wealthy.

If you own stock in Lockheed-Martin, the Carlyle Group, General Dynamics, and Northrop-Grumman, which is better: a quick, efficient victory, followed by a stable transition to new governance, and then a rapid withdrawal, or a quick, efficient victory followed by a meatgrinder of civil and sectarian strife that bogs down the world's most powerful military machine for a decade or longer?

Cui bono?

Those bastards may have outsmarted all of us on both sides.

More Americans Enter Reality-based World

When only 16% of the nation thinks that the Chimperor's administration is truthful about what happened on 9/11/2001, that's some deep doodoo, to quote the elder Bush. And speaking of Bush 41, he and his cabinet members now must bear the burden of the idiot son, Bush 43, completely fucking up the Middle East and generally weakening the United States in every arena. And they knew it was going to happen, emphasizing again how these mandarins always put their power over the national interest.

"Everyone knew how Rumsfeld acts," another key 41 assistant said. "Everyone knew 43 didn't have an attention span. Everyone knew Condi [Rice] wouldn't be able to stand up to Cheney and Rumsfeld. We told them all of this, and we were told we don't know what we're doing."

That any American still naively believes that politicians act out of conscience is frightening, but that they can be so utterly bamboozled by power-mad fiends with no conscience at all is even more frightening.

We've got to quit acting like children looking for a daddy or a mommy to make our world safe. Democrats, Republicans, independents, all politicians are corrupted by the electoral process, and owe their offices to focused special interests, not to the people who elected them. Politicians respond to the will of the people only when they fear the people. That's how power works.

And yet, despite the debacle we have entered thanks to arrogant power, we do not see people in the streets.

When I was in Leipzig, Germany, earlier this year, I spent some time in the Stasi Museum which documents the abuses of that internal security mechanism against the citizens of the state. The Stasi was perhaps the most efficient and widespread internal security operation in history. In October of 1989, however, the people got fed up. A paving stone in the town square commemorates the event when the people surrounded the secret service headquarters that now houses the museum and began chanting, "Stasi raus!" The Stasi officers barricaded themselves inside the building, genuinely fearing for their lives.

You know the rest of the story. On November 9, the Berlin Wall fell. Less than a year later, the East German regime ceased to exist.

The memorial, that paving stone, is simply the impressions of different pairs of feet. Feet on the street. That's how people take back their power.