By Michael Arvey
The law of political diversion locates its survival roots in nature. For example, the common killdeer, in order to divert an intruder's attention, will fly off her nest and feign injury, and will continue to try to divert the intruder away from her nesting ground. In the process of this distraction display, she will voice aloud and noisy "kill-deeah", thus hoping to save her brood of eggs or chicks.
Homo Politico Americanus well knows this tactic of distraction and frequently employs this stratagem when the fires under its feet get hot, although it does so for far more sinister reasons than merely to save its offspring. The present administration frequently uses this tactic to save itself from embarrassing exposures that would uncover suspicious and specious behavior and most probably even criminal liability (the rubric of national security falls under the law of diversion as well).
Recent examples in point: A few weeks ago tens of thousands of protesters marched against Bush during his visit with the U.K.'s ever-faithful Tony Blair, Bush's imperialistic partner in the Middle East. That same weekend, thousands of Americans demonstrated their displeasure over FTAA trade policies and tactics at its conference in Miami, during which they got the snot soundly pummeled out of them for exercising their First Amendment rights. Police violence was calculated, massive, swift and ugly. The message was clear--First Amendment dissent will not be tolerated in Bush's (Mr. "I love free speech") America. Remarkably, the protests in London bore little resemblance to Miami's unleashing of vicious guard-dog enforcers, funded, incidentally, by monies appropriated for Iraq.
Bursting onto the scene as if out of nowhere, pop star icon Michael Jackson suddenly got splashed across news screens. Allegedly for child molestation, a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and a moral shudder, consumed the American public-- an event that quickly flooded and dominated the news. British and U.S. protest coverage collapsed into a media black hole. Interestingly enough, at the same time, protests against Georgia President Edouard Shevardnadze received extensive media coverage--another despot notorious for committing election fraud and who was befouled by corruption. (The alternative press reported the protests were actually engineered by U.S. elites fearing Shevardnadze would stray back into the Russian fold, nixing U.S. geopolitical interests.) Nonetheless, the law of diversion is strongly evident here--democratic protests were eclipsed and then stealthily replaced with a set of different eggs--Jackson and Shevardnadze--demonstrating how criticisms and exposures of Bush disappear down a hole. Kill-deeah, Kill-deeah.
It gets worse
On December 13, President Bush signed into law H.R.2417, which expands the FBI's power to investigate and to reduce the privacy rights of American citizens. Prior to its passage in Congress and now Bush
