| 16 Words + 28 Pages = 44 Distractions
by Allen Snyder
opednews.com
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Über-indignant editorials are flying from the right like RPG shrapnel
at US troops. Wingnut pundits are assuming full defensive posture, talking
much faster and making less sense than usual. They’re queuing up around
the block rationalizing Bush’s 16-word State of the Union lie and
offering up creative explanations why 28 pages in the recently released
850-page report on the intelligence failures and governmental snafus prior
to 9/11 are blacked out. Predictably, BushCo’s lies and cover-ups
religiously comply with its three cardinal rules of political
manipulation.
Distract. Distract. Distract.
16 Words
Wingnuts are feverishly stoking their medicinal stashes of rhetorical
skills hoping we’ll be too stoned to remember BushCo knew for months the
Niger nuclear evidence was bogus, but lied about it anyway. While
attentive readers are hip to this tedious shell game, the wingnuts’
synchronized intellectual contortions allow them one luxury among a
haplessly ignorant and mentally malleable public - implying that 16 words
exhausts BushCo’s shameless chicanery.
Can’t you just hear the pitch?
"Ok, guys, it’s like this: we’ll get those liberal pantywaists
freaked about Niger and get Fox, CNN, and MSNBC to beat it to death. When
we’re finished with ‘em, they’ll look like petty nit-picky whiners.
We win again!! Whoo-hoo!!" (High-fives abound while Karl ‘Mr. Burns’
Rove wrings his hands, grins maniacally, and mutters quietly,
"Excellent. Excellent.").
It’s as simple as this, folks: if Bush lies every time he opens his
mouth (and he does), then evidence of his lying should be everywhere
(which it is). Hence the necessity for distractions.
Remember? BushCo’s biggest selling point for Operation Kill Lotsa
Iraqis was that Saddam and Osama were joined at the hip, killed babies for
fun, played WMD™ footsies, and had evil anti-American terrorist
connections out the wazoo. Since Day One, any connection between Saddam
and Osama has been laughed off as preposterous by anyone not wearing
BushCo’s ideological blinders (Free With Partial Brain-ectomy!).
Further, dozens of Americans have died since Dubya declared victory and
there’s still no sign of the WMD™ he assured us were aimed straight at
our SUV factories, Baby Gap outlets, and reality show production studios.
Is anybody with functioning cranial neurons still clinging to the fantasy
that Saddam just hid the WMD™ really, really well, sold them to sundry
religious crazies, or spirited them away to Syria or Iran? Does BushCo
just simply turn the 24-hour propaganda channel to The Weapons ‘Program’
without skipping a beat and face nothing for it?
This was NEVER about weapons ‘programs’ and everybody knows it. It
was about long-range missiles, thousands of liters of anthrax, giant
barrels of sarin, huge tanks of mustard gas, ‘reconstituted nuclear
weapons’, and 45-minutes-and-kiss-your-ass-goodbye.
Mushroom clouds. Millions dead. Imminent danger. Imminent threat.
Too bad none of it was true.
28 Pages
These pages look just like scads of other ‘declassified’ government
documents. We’re told they include sensitive national security stuff we’re
not smart enough to understand, so the creepy Wolfowitz types go crazy
with their big fat markers. They black it out for our good, our
protection, our safety.
Yeah, right.
You’d think since 9/11 was such a tragically defining moment, the
results of any investigation would be comprehensive, complete, and
trumpeted across the country as evidence there’s actually some Homeland
Security going on out there and we can finally guard efficiently against
further attacks. Sadly, such is not the case.
BushCo knows the corporate media’s attention is focused entirely on
what’s being covered up - what’s blacked out. The smart money says its
evidence that elements of the Saudi government bankrolled 9/11 for the
predominantly Saudi hijackers, that BushCo knows all about it, but is
avoiding the inevitable negative political fall-out if anyone finds out.
Protecting corrupt allies. Nothing new here.
Lurking behind all the hoopla, though, are some chilling questions and
possibilities. For instance, imagine if the BushCo chickenhawks, in their
collective zeal to expand American influence, selectively ignored or (sub)consciously
trivialized certain pre-9/11 intelligence, thus implicitly and indirectly
conspiring with the hijackers to facilitate the ‘Pearl Harbor-like’
event that neocon PNAC signatories desperately needed to jump-start the
radically reactionary agenda they’re daily foisting on the world.
With everything else in place; another brainless Republican in the
White House, a fanatically right-wing GOP Congress, a tainted Supreme
Court, and a respectfully compliant and docile media run by BushCo
sympathizers, all they needed was one catastrophic event to bring it all
home. 9/11 was what they’ve been breathlessly waiting for all along and
they wasted no time exploiting it. If there’s one thing BushCo’s
taught me it’s ‘the ends always justify the means’, no matter
how high the bodies stack up. Besides, after seeing what this crowd means
by ‘acting in the public good’, I wouldn’t put anything past them.
Distractions like these are harmful to our democratic health, so let’s
keep our eye on the ball, huh? Getting these clowns out in 2004.
Allen Snyder is an
instructor of Philosophy and Ethics. He can be reached at asnyder111@hotmail.com
This
article is copyright by Allen Snyder and originally
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